Russell local Tabatha Bird had an unexpected encounter last week when her cat flap became the entranceway for a kiwi.
After a skirmish with a frog her feline friend had trapped the previous night, the sounds of scuffling weren’t exactly welcome.
“I thought she’d [the cat] come in and bought a mouse. And hilariously the night before we’d had an incident with a screaming frog. So I was like...is it going to be a frog again?”
“In the low light, I could see a long beak but I thought ‘That’s a weka, it must be a weka’.”
A flick of the torch revealed her new visitor was a young North Island brown kiwi.
Technical Manager Niki Minchin said visits from Kiwi were becoming more prevalent with population growth.
“I hear stories everyday now about how kiwi are coming up to porches and backyards.”
Minchin estimated around 2,000 kiwi reside on the peninsula and numbers have grown exponentially over the last 20 years.
Bird’s encounter joined a list of interesting places kiwi have turned up - earlier this year sawmill workers in Whangārei were surprised by a fully grown kiwi, while last year a kiwi took a nap in a hen house.
Minchin believed the increase in sightings was a mixture of kiwi moving into suburbia and humans encroaching on their habitat.
Unfortunately, with that has come an increase in kiwi road deaths, Minchin said.
In the last year he has picked up nine dead kiwi off the road.
“We do report the deaths to DoC and they say it’s a good sign, that more kiwi are on the road which means there are more obviously out there, which is a hard pill to swallow.”
“We have to accept that’s just part of the [growth] in numbers.”
But it remained equally important to ensure both locals and visitors understood to watch out for kiwi on roads and control their dogs, he said.
Over 800 residents in the area have been spoken to and have agreed to have some form of pest control on their property.
The group was also working hard to place signs up near roads.