A nose for kiwi

While normally any furry mammals are kept well out of the sanctuary, this month we opened the gates for some very special working dogs. These dogs are part of the Conservation Dogs programme which mentors, certifies, and supports a nationwide network of dog-handler teams to detect Aotearoa New Zealand’s protected species or unwanted predators. These dogs in particular were helping sniff out kiwi for a kiwi pukupuku/little spotted kiwi survey in Zealandia.

We do these surveys around every five years as one of our monitoring tools to see how the kiwi population here is doing. The last survey like this was done in 2018 and found that kiwi encounter rates were much higher than the previous 2011 survey.

While we never know the exact numbers of a species in Zealandia (other than the takahē), tools like this help us estimate how a population might be doing. The original 40 kiwi were brought into Zealandia from Kāpiti Island between 2000 and 2001, and this population has been growing ever since.