KEY POINTS:
An isolated population of quail on Auckland's Tiritiri Matangi Island is thought to be a native species regarded as extinct for 102 years.
A Massey University researcher, Mark Seabrook-Davison, is carrying out genetic tests on the tiny ground-dwelling birds to confirm they are survivors of the New Zealand quail thought to have been extinct since about 1875.
"At this stage, the notion that these quail may be a surviving group of New Zealand quail is quite speculative," Mr Seabrook-Davison told the university's newsletter. "It's also been suggested that they may be a hybrid".
The New Zealand quail, coturnix novaezelandiae, were once abundant throughout the mainland and on Great Barrier Island, but are recorded as the second bird species to be wiped out during European settlement.
Mr Seabrook-Davison, part of the university's Auckland-based ecology and conservation group, said quail were known to have been on Tiritiri Matangi for at least 100 years.
Genetic testing will be carried out at the university's Albany campus, to compare the birds with samples from museum specimens, and with introduced Australian quail.
The Australian brown or swamp quail - thought to be similar to the NZ native but half their size - Californian quail and bobwhites are all established in the North Island for recreational hunting.
If the Tiritiri Matangi birds are shown to be native survivors, the find could also have important implications for future conservation projects in the Hauraki Gulf islands, he said.
"There is keen interest in the possibility of putting these quail on to other islands. Because they are a ground bird of a particular type, they play their own part in the bigger ecological picture. They are very good at distributing seeds and tilling the leaf litter."
Some ornithologists have expressed doubts about the possibility that the Tiritiri Matangi birds are native quail. Australia's brown quail are a different genus from the NZ species, so would be unlikely to have interbred with them.
Sir Joseph Banks reported sightings of the bird about 1770 in his journal of James Cook's first voyage. The first specimen was described in 1827 near Thames. But by 1840 its was less common, and in 1865 the population plunged in the South Island - apparently because its tussock grassland habitat was being destroyed by fires clearing land for farming.
Known to the Maori as the koreke, it was regarded as having been exterminated in the North Island by 1870, and the South Island populations had vanished by 1875, says the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand.
- NZPA
