"Two wild kiwi chicks were born near Wellington, New Zealand, about a year after a reintroduction program began in the city, the Capital Kiwi Project announced last week. The fluffy, brown babies are the first to be born near the country’s capital in at least 150 years.
“This is very special for the team, which has been working hard for the last few years,” project founder Paul Ward tells the Agence France-Presse. The chicks are a “massive milestone for our goal of building a wild population of kiwi on Wellington’s back doorstep.”
These flightless, chicken-sized birds were once abundant across New Zealand, with the nation’s five species numbering an estimated 12 million individuals in total. But nonnative predators and habitat loss caused their populations to plummet. Today, approximately 68,000 kiwis remain....
Conservation and reintroduction programs, including the Capital Kiwi Project, have been working to restore a large-scale wild kiwi population for years. In 2022, the organization released 11 kiwis into the wild in Makara, a suburb about seven miles west of Wellington. Between February and May of 2023, another 52 birds were released, and 200 more are slated to be released over the next five years, reports Eva Corlett for the Guardian.
Along with reintroduction efforts, the project aimed to reduce threats from European stoats, also known as ermines. The mammals were brought to New Zealand in the 19th century in an attempt to eradicate another introduced creature: rabbits. But these weasel-like stoats are voracious predators and kill many of New Zealand’s native species, including kiwi chicks. Only about 5 percent of kiwi chicks survive to reach breeding age in areas where predators are not controlled, largely thanks to stoats. In areas under management, however, 50 to 60 percent survive. Knowing this, conservationists worked with 100 landowners across the bird’s 60,000-acre habitat to install 4,600 stoat traps.
Of the 63 adult kiwis now roaming the hilly farmlands of Makara, only about a quarter are being monitored—meaning more chicks will likely hatch in the near future. Conservationists will continue monitoring the two new chicks, though Ward tells the Guardian they still have a long way to go before they’re fully grown...
Over the years, the long-beaked birds have become a national symbol of New Zealand, with people who hail from the country often referred to as kiwis. The animals also hold special importance to the Māori people of New Zealand, who have cultural, spiritual and historic associations with the birds. Even the New Zealand dollar is sometimes referred to as the kiwi, and the bird is featured on the country’s dollar coin."
-via Smithsonian Magazine, December 6, 2023
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Kiwi for Marchirp day 6: flightless birds! Obviously I had to draw my blog namesake 😊
(Marchirp is run by @elliottnotyet)
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trot trot trot
[ID: marker art of a kiwi bird running with text reading "I will keep putting one foot in front of the other even when it sucks." Sucks is underlined for emphasis. The background is plain white, and the artists signature is @ watercolour critters. End ID.]
Instagram | Etsy
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would you be opposed to drawing a silly little kiwi bird, or perhaps even…Baby Pūkeko 👀
@offalreblogs also requested a baby pūkeko, so I drew both kiwi and pūkeko.... I literally only have an orangey pen and a brown posca so all the brown birds are really difficult 😭
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[ID: an illustration of a fluffy brown kiwi bird facing to the left. The background is green with a pattern like the inside of a kiwi fruit. End.]
Kiwi! Iconic flightless bird of New Zealand. Their eggs are the largest proportional to body size of any bird, at up to one-quarter the weight of the bird laying them.
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One of my New Year’s resolutions is to be a bit less shy about posting my cross stitch designs so uh… here you go, a kiwi band :D it’ll be turned into a bracelet soon enough but it does actually quite work as a bookmark.
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