The kiwi, New Zealand’s flightless and fuzzy national icon, is a bird of contradictions. Revered by a nation whose people proudly call themselves “kiwis,” it is now so rare that many have never seen one in the wild.
The kiwi’s plight is symptomatic of a nationwide ecological crisis. Over the past century, 62 of New Zealand’s native bird species have gone extinct, and more than 80 percent of the remaining breeding birds are at risk.
The primary cause of this decline is a legacy of human settlement: invasive predators. Animals like rats arrived as stowaways on ships, while others, such as stoats and possums, were deliberately introduced by European settlers for food, fur, or simple nostalgia. With no natural enemies to control their numbers, these non-native populations exploded, preying on New Zealand’s unique and defenseless native birds.
In response, the country has launched one of the world’s most ambitious conservation efforts, Predator Free 2050. This national project aims to completely eliminate the most destructive invasive predators by mid-century, a goal that will require killing tens of millions of non-native animals.
In the dense forests of Whakatāne, a conservation team from the Whakatāne Kiwi Trust is searching for a five-week-old chick recently released into the wild. Since kiwi are nocturnal, the team relies on a radio transmitter on the chick’s leg to track its location. “Once you see them, you just love them,” says Claire Travers, the trust’s kiwi operations manager, after the team locates the chirping chick for a health check. “It never gets old.”
Simply finding the chick alive is an achievement. In this region, only five percent of kiwi chicks survive to adulthood, primarily due to one relentless predator: the stoat. Introduced in the late 1800s to control rabbit populations, these fearless members of the weasel family have become expert hunters of New Zealand’s birds.
Kiwi evolved over millions of years without mammalian ground predators. Their instinct to freeze when threatened, an effective defense against airborne raptors, is useless against stoats, which use a powerful sense of smell to locate nests and snatch chicks. “You find a leg with a little transmitter attached where a stoat has dragged it and eaten the rest,” Travers says. “That’s the heartbreak for me.”
To give the kiwi a fighting chance, the trust maintains a network of 800 traps. However, eradicating the predators is a daunting task, as the most cunning stoats learn to avoid the traps and teach their young to do the same.
This battle is being waged across the country. In Whakatāne, the first indigenous-led project, Korehāhā Whakahau, is run by the Māori tribe Ngāti Awa. Their focus is on eradicating brushtail possums, an Australian marsupial that devastates native forests. Using advanced tools like thermal-sensing drones, the team has seen native bird life rebound. “It used to be all you hear is the wind, but now, all you hear is birds everywhere,” says team leader Thomas Monaghan. “This is how it should be.”
While predators have been successfully eliminated on over 100 offshore islands and within fenced sanctuaries, clearing them from the more than 100,000 square miles of mainland New Zealand is an environmental moonshot. “It’s bold and ambitious, but I believe that’s what we need to do,” says Brent Beaven, who manages the Predator Free 2050 program at New Zealand’s Department of Conservation.
Success on such a scale, Beaven notes, will require new technologies, such as AI-powered cameras and traps, as well as genetic research into species-specific toxins or reproductive controls.
However, some experts question the nationwide strategy. John Innes, a conservation expert at the New Zealand Institute for Bioeconomy Science, argues that limited resources might be better spent on protecting biodiversity hotspots and building more fenced ecosanctuaries. “The perfect has become the enemy of the good, I think,” he says.
The project also raises profound ethical questions about the morality of killing millions of animals to save others. “There’s this standard, mainstream animal ethics view which is: maybe we shouldn’t ever harm cute, sentient, charismatic mammals,” says Emily Parke of the University of Auckland, who has studied the ethics of conservation.
While public support for the program is high in New Zealand, Parke says the focus remains on humane methods. For many conservationists, the moral imperative is clear. Humans created the problem by introducing these species, and now they have a responsibility to address the consequences.
“If we don’t take action, we are killing our native wildlife by omission,” Beaven states. “Something’s going to die regardless. I would rather preserve that global biodiversity and preserve these unique species that don’t occur anywhere else.”
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