Nicola Toki has more range than most of us. On Newshub Nation recently, she was sitting opposite a former government minister and persuasively calling out the farming sector for its “refusal to engage in the rules that the rest of us have to” on climate emissions. This week, she launches a TV show with one of the country’s best-known comedians. But it all makes sense in the context of a life of advocacy for nature.
The show, Endangered Species Aotearoa, teams her with Pax Assadi to get out, find and film some of the country’s most threatened species. The format – he’s the gormless city boy and she’s the enthusiastic expert – is adapted from a Finnish show, Most Endangered Species, and like that series, comes with the endorsement of the World Wildlife Fund.
When Warner Bros contacted her to talk about the programme more than two years ago, she was the Department of Conservation’s director of operations for the eastern South Island and its threatened-species ambassador. She happily made suggestions on what it could include – without clicking at first that the company actually wanted her to present it.
Not long after it got the green light, she became the chief executive of Forest & Bird. “And so, I had to do it all in my spare time, which I don’t have much of,” says Toki.
It’s not hard to see why Warner called. Toki’s career has been a weave of executive and management roles and media. She was a senior media adviser for DoC when she made more than 200 four-minute episodes of the creature show Meet the Locals for TVNZ 6 and 7. She presented the Discovery series Modern Dinosaurs in 2017 and features on Critter of the Week with Jesse Mulligan on RNZ National. But she had particular reasons for wanting to do Endangered Species Aotearoa.
“It’s always a shame to me that the wildlife shows we see on telly are often – like my hero David Attenborough’s shows – about lions and tigers and elephants and bears and not things we have here. So it was an opportunity to show New Zealand what’s special about here.
“I also have this real thing about how talking about nature becomes quite earnest, and sometimes a little bit boring. We use words people can’t really engage with – I do it all the time in my day job.
“You know, we’re really concerned about biodiversity loss, and people are like, ‘Hmm, don’t know what that is, sounds foreign.’ So to be able to tell that story, but with a few laughs as we go along, feels like a great way of bringing people with us.”
In truth, the comedy works because Toki herself is up to it – she’s quick with a line or a laugh. By the same token, Assadi’s city-boy persona isn’t just a shtick and he’s genuinely amazed at times by what he sees. “He was very clear at the beginning: ‘I don’t need to ham it up to be the out-of-my-comfort-zone city boy, because I genuinely will be.’ Him being out of his comfort zone is enjoyable for me, but he gets to see this stuff for the first time and viewers get to vicariously experience Pax’s reactions.”
The first episode returns Toki to her natural habitat, the Mackenzie Basin and Aoraki/Mt Cook National Park, where she spent part of her childhood and her father was a ski-plane pilot.
There, the pair encounter the tiny rock wren, New Zealand’s only true alpine bird – and the opposite of the charismatic megafauna we’re used to seeing on TV – and the robust grasshopper (the female of the species is as chunky as the name suggests).
Smaller yet is the mountain stone wētā. In the alpine winter, up to 80% of its body freezes, thawing out in spring. Fans of the killer fact will find rich pickings here.
“I think New Zealanders think all our wildlife is a bit meh – and actually, it has these unbelievable traits that blow humans out of the water.”
What also makes Endangered Species Aotearoa different from more formal nature documentaries is that while a BBC team can wait months for a rare creature to appear and do its thing, the producers here need them to turn up on cue. The rock wrens, for example, were elusive and then simply appeared while the cameras were rolling for an exchange between the hosts.
“That was incredible. Because if you think about it, we’re standing halfway up Mt Sefton in the Southern Alps, right? In the largest mountain range in the country. These things are the size of golf balls. And it just happened they turned up exactly where we were. We were yapping to the scientist and she said, ‘There they go.’”
It all makes for a strikingly watchable show – and an upbeat programme about the gloomy subject of species loss.
“It is a depressing topic,” Toki says. “New Zealand, where we love to be No 1, has the highest proportion of threatened species per capita in the world. That’s a pretty dubious honour.
“But when you tell people things are crap all the time, they just can’t engage. It’s why we can’t engage with climate change – because it’s too hard and we feel helpless.
“Most New Zealanders don’t know, for example, that in areas where there’s no pest control – and that’s most of the country – 19 out of 20 kiwi chicks won’t survive to one year of age because they get smashed over by stoats.
“A 95% fatality rate is a pathway to extinction. However, where people are working to protect them, that’s reversed. So, I guess the guts of the show is to be able to demonstrate that there is hope when there’s action.
“My always optimistic kind of goal is, if people can see that there’s hope, they will want to act.”
Endangered Species Aotearoa with WWF, TVNZ 1, Mondays from July 3, 8.30pm, and TVNZ+.
