the sensor on my camera is kaput, hence the weird colour and bleed marks on the photo, but this is an okay kiwi house. There are of course all sorts of regulations in NZ as to minimum size etc, so most of the houses around the country are fairly comparable to each other.
You can probably see that there's a shade-cloth fence across the middle of the enclosure. When this photo was taken the male and female birds in here had been separated because they hated each other. The male was unduly humanised and was a terrible display bird (he barely ever came out, but conversely he didn't mind being handled at all which is very unusual in kiwi). That male is now up at Wellington Zoo where he is being used as a sort of "meet-and-greet" bird. The male now at Hokitika came down from Otorohanga about two months ago and I've just started the process of introducing him to the female (it's a delicate process because kiwi are very aggressive birds and if you're not careful you end up with one dead kiwi and one victorious kiwi).
The male now at Hokitika came down from Otorohanga about two months ago and I've just started the process of introducing him to the female (it's a delicate process because kiwi are very aggressive birds and if you're not careful you end up with one dead kiwi and one victorious kiwi).
after they kill something they continue stomping on it until it looks like road-kill, apparently.
They use their feet for attack and defence. An adult kiwi can kill a cat quite easily (so the books say: I've never witnessed that myself!) but I've seen a few kiwi-against-kiwi battles. Even mated pairs sometimes fight with what looks like full-on ferocity, and it isn't unknown for the female of a pair to suddenly kill her mate after years of living together peacefully (I suspect that probably only happens in captivity: imagine a husband and wife trapped together in the same house 24-7, one would probably also want to kill the other after a few years!!).
It has been written that if kiwi were the size of humans then nobody would ever go out into the bush unarmed.
don't let the name of the place fool you. It is in no way the "national kiwi centre", it is just a name to attract the tourists. (There is a history behind the name but it's a bit long-winded to go into it).
There is just one pair of kiwi and they are North Island brown kiwi. The facility is purely a display house for advocacy purposes. (All the captive kiwi in NZ are part of the same management programme, so some places display birds, some breed, some take part in Operation Nest Egg, some do all three at once; but they are all governed by the same management plan). The pair here are young birds which will probably get released at some later date, and replaced by another young pair, and so on.
