LC2212 - the baby Kiwi - takes a keen interest in Todd Hamilton’s hat during the bird’s first walk from the nest on a farm in Purua, Northland.
LC2212 - the baby Kiwi - takes a keen interest in Todd Hamilton’s hat during the bird’s first walk from the nest on a farm in Purua, Northland.
The sunhat and gumboots - typical Kiwi attire for summer in Northland.
And it appears that a days-old Northland kiwi chick is after his own, after taking a keen interest in a kiwi ranger’s hat and gumboots during his very first walk out of the nest.
Scott Hamilton, from Backyard Kiwi, captured an adorable video of the chick - provisionally named LC2212 (for Landcare 2022 and it being one of 12 eggs laid in the area that year) - on his first day out of the burrow while the kiwi’s dad sat on another egg.
Hamilton said kiwi are starting to thrive in parts of Northland that have had strict pest control - though too many were still being killed by dogs - with numbers in the area looked after by Kiwi Coast and Backyard Kiwi growing from the 80 or so recorded 20 years ago to around 1100 now.
He said he was checking the nest that LC2212′s dad was sitting on around 10am on January 28, on the Lovell’s farm in Purua, to put a tracking transmitter on the baby bird, when he saw that the dad was sitting on a second egg - kiwi mums can lay up to two eggs at a time, then it’s up to the kiwi dads to sit on the eggs and help raise the young.
LC2212 - just a few days old - exploring the world for the first time after kiwi ranger Todd Hamilton fitted him with a transmitter.
Hamilton said the then four-day-old chick had an unco-ordinated walk around outside the nest - hardly surprising, he says, as it was its first time out of the nest and he was wearing a transmitter on his leg - and took a keen interest in his sunhat and gumboots.
“Kiwi are nocturnal birds, so they have great senses of smell and hearing, and they use their nose a lot to sniff around. He smelled my hat (that had fallen on the floor), then had a sniff and seemed to recognise that my gumboots smelled the same, so came over to have a little nosy and join the dots.
"That’s how they work things out, and people can see him doing that [in the video] and using his bill to look for things to eat among the leaves on the floor. And looking at it, he’s already up to speed with what was in his little world."
Hamilton said with the recent rain there is plenty of food on the forest floor for kiwi in Northland, so it was less likely that people would see them roaming as much as they did during recent drought years.
“There’s plenty of food there for them at the moment, so they don’t need to be straying too far.”
Backyard Kiwi project manager Todd Hamilton checks a kiwi burrow.
He said kiwi lay their two eggs about 10 days apart, so they hatch at different times to increase their chance of survival, but with the second egg not having hatched yet - he visited the nest again this week - he suspects it is dead.
On Tuesday this week, he took the 12-day old LC2212 to the ‘kiwi creche’ on Matakohe/Limestone Island in Whangārei Harbour as part of the Kiwi Coast engagement programme.
“Once he has grown to over 1200 grams, we will catch up with him and release him into community-driven kiwi recovery areas with good dog control and good stoat control.”
At some stage, LC2212 will get a proper name from the public ahead of his release.
Hamilton said kiwi conservation had really taken off in Northland over the past two decades, with a number of predator-free controlled areas across the region for kiwi to thrive in - largely thanks to the Kiwi Coast initiative - and the efforts have uncovered new ways of helping the flightless birds.
A lot of them now nest in pampas grass, rather than burrows, and they seem to have a much better rate of survival.
LC2212 - the baby Kiwi - takes a keen interest in Todd Hamilton’s hat during the bird’s first walk from the nest on a farm in Purua, Northland.
