The Ambitious Effort to Save New Zealand’s Iconic Bird

0:00Today on State of the World, the ambitious effort to save New Zealand's iconic bird. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories, up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. A bold conservation project is underway in New Zealand. The country's unique birds are disappearing, largely because of invasive species that were brought there by humans. So an effort is underway to kill off millions of those invasive animals. NPR's Lauren Sommer takes us to a jungle in New Zealand to learn about the project to save the country's most famous bird.

0:44The kiwi is round and fuzzy and totally flightless. New Zealanders are even known as kiwis. But despite its fame, many people in New Zealand have never actually seen one. Once you see them, you just love them. Claire Travers works for the Fakatani Kiwi Trust, a group that helps protect kiwi. She says it's hard to find them because kiwi only come out at night, and because now they're rare. What we're going to do now is go out and locate a young chick. This morning, Travers is checking on a five-week-old chick that was just released into the wild. It's wearing a radio transmitter, so the team is scanning to figure out where it is.

1:25Oh look, it's getting stronger there now. The jungle in Fakatani, New Zealand, is dense. full of trees and giant ferns.

1:37Kiwi are in underground burrows this time of day, but we do find signs of them around. So you can see these holes. Keturah Bouchard volunteers with the Kiwi Project. She's pointing to a bunch of small puncture holes in the dirt. So they'll stick their beacon and they kind of sometimes swirl it around a little. It's how they find worms and bugs to eat. After searching all morning, the team zeroes in on the chick. I got it. It's a female North Island brown kiwi, a tiny fluff ball with a long beak. We're checking her eyes and ears. They do a health check. She's lost a little weight. You want them a bit stroppy.

2:19You want them a bit feisty. That was a good thing. But you see how small she is? She's living here all on her own, just doing her thing. Young kiwi are very vulnerable. Only 5 % of them survive here, Travers says. And it's mostly due to one predator. Stoats are the primary predator for the young chicks. Stoats are related to weasels and ferrets. They were brought here by European settlers in the late 1800s to control rabbits, which settlers also brought to New Zealand. Stoats are only about a foot long, but they're basically like the Terminator. They are very smart. Very, very smart. I mean, a stoat can climb really well, gets through very small holes, will take on a predator that's much, much bigger than it is.

3:04Kiwi didn't evolve with predators like this, Travers says, because New Zealand had no land mammals aside from bats. And since kiwi can't fly, they have no chance against an invasive species like stoats. Stoats pick them off right when the kiwi chicks leave the nest. You find a leg with a little transmitter attached where a stoat has drugged it and eaten the rest of it. That's the heartbreak for me. So to save Kiwi, the group is trying to get rid of stoats. Got a DOC 200 here. That's the trap mechanism. Gay Pays is predator control coordinator for the Whakatani Kiwi Trust. She's pointing to a wire mesh box with a trap at the back.

3:46which when it's depressed goes off and a heavy bar comes down and crushes and kills the animal instantly. Pais says the traps have gone through animal welfare testing to make sure they're as humane as possible. Her team has set hundreds of traps targeting stoats. They are such hard animals to capture. I mean it's easy when you start but when you get to this stage in our project, we've been going for like over 20 years, you're really down to the hardcore. Hardcore stoats are the ones that have learned to avoid traps. And they teach their young to avoid traps too. Travers says it's a battle, but one they can't walk away from.

4:23If we weren't doing what we were doing as a nation for Kiwi, within the next two generations, they'd be gone. This trapping project is part of a nationwide goal. One that is pretty colossal. New Zealand wants to get rid of invasive predators by 2050. That includes getting rid of three species of rats, which eat native bird chicks and eggs, and brush-tailed possums, an Australian animal that devours native trees. In all, it will mean eradicating millions of animals. Yeah, it's bold and ambitious, but I believe that's what we need to do in the world. Brent Bevan manages the Predator-Free 2050 program at New Zealand's Department of Conservation.

5:06He says there are small pockets, mostly islands off the coast, where invasive predators have been eliminated. Because when you take predators away, all of our birds breed really well, the forest grows further, it becomes a thriving ecosystem without that constant pressure from these introduced animals. Still, right now, Bevan says New Zealand doesn't have the technology to eliminate all the predators. They're working on it, he says. Things like traps that use artificial intelligence to target certain species, or using genetic research to find poisons that will only work on one animal. Technology could also drive down the cost, which will likely be more than$100 million per year.

5:48But given the high body count of the project, what about the debate over animal rights? There's this sort of standard mainstream animal ethics view, which is maybe we shouldn't ever harm cute, sentient, charismatic mammals. Emily Park studies the ethics of conservation at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She says that hasn't been a big sticking point because the New Zealand public is largely supportive, according to polling. The ethical questions that arise are really less about is it OK to do this and more about what values should we be upholding as we do it, even if we all agree with the aim of a predator-free New Zealand, we might disagree about ways of achieving that aim.

6:30Animal rights groups like the SPCA say they want to see the development of non-lethal methods of control. Bevan of New Zealand's Department of Conservation says you have to consider that New Zealand's birds are already dying. If we don't take action, we are killing our native wildlife by omission. Choosing not to take an action is an action. So either way, something's going to die based on the decisions we make. That's the tricky part of the biodiversity crisis, he says, given how much humans have already altered the planet. Lauren Sommer, NPR News.

7:10That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.