KEY POINTS:
The ornithologist who helped re-discover a native seabird thought for 150 years to be extinct has shot two of them - with a net-gun.
Brent Stephenson, who rediscovered the storm petrel, with Sav Saville, off the coast of Whitianga in January 2003, captured two of the birds with a net fired out of a custom-made gun. "It's not every day you get to hold a seabird that for 150 years was thought to be extinct, let alone hold two," he said.
Altogether three of the "extinct" New Zealand storm petrels were captured in the Hauraki Gulf by Department of Conservation (DoC) staff and scientists.
The expedition, funded jointly by DoC and a grant from National Geographic's committee for research and exploration, was part of an effort to discover where the birds are breeding. It lives and feeds at sea, returning to land only to breed.
If the captured birds had showed signs of breeding, they would have had tracking beacons attached before being released, Dr Stephenson said.
None of them were breeding, so their island home is still a mystery.
DoC officer Karen Baird said it was thought the petrels might be breeding where rodents had been eradicated, such as the Mokohinau islands in the outer Hauraki Gulf.
"One of the theories is that the birds survived in very low numbers on an island where rats were present and once the rats were removed, the birds have been quietly building up in numbers until they began to be noticed several years ago."
Last year, three storm petrels were caught and fitted with transmitters, but extensive searches around islands in the Hauraki Gulf failed to reveal any of the birds on land.
- NZPA
