I grew up in Wellington and as a kid spent a bit of time in the wonderful greenbelt that surrounds the city. Back then, while there was relatively abundant plantlife, a walk or jog up there was a fairly silent experience – serene, to be sure, but not exactly full of life.
If we fast forward 40 years, that situation has completely changed. Zealandia, a huge number of voluntary community-based predator trapping programmes and the efforts of a host of visionary individuals mean that a run in those same hills is far less serene, but far more awesome.
Last week that transformation hit a genuinely remarkable milestone. The Capital Kiwi Project, the mob who’ve spent the best part of a decade trying to put kiwi back on Wellington’s western hills, pulled the last tracking transmitters off their final monitored adult and final monitored chick. On the surface that sounds like a fairly niche bit of conservation admin. In reality it’s the full stop at the end of one of the more audacious rewilding sentences written in this country in recent memory.
Some numbers, because I’m a numbers person and because they tell the story better than adjectives can. Over 5,300 predator traps spread across 24,000 hectares – farms, forestry blocks, city suburbs, even power infrastructure. Something in the order of half a million individual trap checks. Two hundred and fifty birds translocated and released into that landscape. And somewhere north of 300 kiwi now estimated to be roaming free in hills that a decade ago most Wellingtonians would have told you were kiwi-free for good.
Here’s the stat that actually stopped me in my tracks though. The Department of Conservation’s target for chick survival – the proportion of kiwi chicks that make it through to the weight where they can fend off a stoat – was 30%. The team running the project thought if they were lucky they might land somewhere around 50%. They hit 90%. That’s not a modest overachievement; that’s the kind of result that makes you reassess what’s actually possible when a community decides to properly commit to something.
And that’s really the point I want to land on, because it’s one I keep coming back to in all sorts of contexts, not just conservation. This wasn’t a government department parachuting in with a five-year plan and a press release. This was landowners, iwi, mana whenua, city dwellers and a small army of volunteers doing unglamorous, repetitive, occasionally miserable work – checking traps in the rain, on farms, in bush that doesn’t want you there – for the better part of ten years, without much fanfare, because they’d decided the outcome mattered more than the credit.
There’s something in the footage of the team out removing that last transmitter that captures it – a mix of pride and something close to grief, because pulling the tech off those birds means the intensive, hands-on phase is over. No more probing, no more pulling a reluctant kiwi out of its burrow at 11pm because you need a weight and a signal check. The birds get to just be wild, properly wild, not managed-wild. One of the team put it simply: these animals have gifted this place its sense of identity and belonging, and what’s happened here is something being repaired, not just protected.
That framing matters. Kiwi were absent from those hills for about 150 years – a blink in a lineage that stretches back millions. Predator Free work often gets talked about in the language of prevention and protection, which is fine but slightly undersells what’s actually happened here. This is restoration. Something that was broken has been put back.
Which brings me to the bit I can’t quite get out of my head as a Wellington kid turned occasional visitor: the noise. Anyone who’s done the Skyline Track or gone for a run through those hills in the last couple of years will know that dawn chorus is not what it was even ten years ago. It’s louder, messier, more alive. That’s not accidental ambience – that’s the direct, measurable output of thousands of trap checks and a lot of people deciding a silent greenbelt wasn’t good enough.
The team behind this milestone are already talking about what’s next – using this as a platform to bring back other taonga species rather than treating it as a finish line. Given what they’ve just pulled off, betting against them would be a mug’s game. Kiwi ora indeed. I salute and thank you all.
