Capital Kiwi project wraps up its 250-bird translocation with a Beehive pōwhiri as Wellington’s wild kiwi take hold for the first time in a century

A live North Island brown kiwi was carried into the Beehive on Monday night for a pōwhiri to mark the end of a project that has put 250 of the birds back into the hills above Wellington, the first wild kiwi to live in the capital for at least a century.

The Capital Kiwi Project’s last translocation reached its permitted limit this week, capping a four-year run of releases that began in 2022 and stretched across 23,455 hectares of Wellington’s western coast. Founder Paul Ward said the response from the public, schools and the iwi who had loaned the birds had gone “beyond our wildest expectations” in terms of the support the project had received.

For most of those who turned out, it was the first time they had stood in the same room as a kiwi. The bird was held by handlers from Capital Kiwi and the iwi who had acted as guardians for the manu, and was returned almost immediately afterwards to a transport carrier and on to the Mākara hills west of the city.

Wellington was once full of kiwi. By the late 1800s, introduced predators had wiped them out from the lower North Island, and for more than a hundred years the closest wild population was a long drive north. The Capital Kiwi Project set out to change that by laying down a network of 4,600 traps across the western coast, knocking back stoats, ferrets, weasels and feral cats long before any bird would be released.

That groundwork took four years. The first kiwi did not arrive in Wellington until 2022, when birds were carried into the city by hapū representatives and released into the predator-controlled hills above Mākara. Each bird since then has been gifted by one iwi and received by another. The Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari sanctuary in the Waikato, the Ōtorohanga Kiwi House and Taranaki Kōhanga Kiwi at Rotokare have all sent birds south, and each release has been opened with a karakia.

Rahul Papa, who chairs Ngāti Korokī Kahukura at Maungatautari, was at the Parliament welcome to represent the source iwi. Rāwiri Walsh, of Taranaki Whānui ki Te Upoko o te Ika, took part for the receiving side, embodying the iwi-to-iwi gifting that has run through every release. The previous Capital Kiwi welcome at Te Papa in 2024 was attended by Pōneke Mayor Tori Whanau and hundreds of others.

The 250-bird permit was issued by the Department of Conservation as part of a wider national programme run by Save the Kiwi, which last year reported a record more than 300 birds translocated in a single year as more sanctuaries reach the population pressure that allows them to give birds away. Capital Kiwi has been one of the largest single recipients in the country.

The project was always going to live or die on the trapping. Stoats are the main killer of kiwi chicks, and a single ferret can take out an adult bird. Capital Kiwi runs the largest community-led predator network in the city, with volunteers walking trap lines through the Mākara, Ohariu and Outer Green Belt blocks, and a small paid crew handling the more remote ridges. The project has reported finding wild-hatched chicks in the same valleys where the first birds were released, evidence that the founder population has begun breeding on its own.

That breeding is the real measure of success. The 250-bird founder population is large enough to give the gene pool depth, and now that wild-hatched chicks are surviving past the dangerous first six months, the population is no longer dependent on more arrivals from the north. Capital Kiwi expects the wild Wellington population to grow on its own from here, provided the trap network keeps holding the line on predators.

There are still risks. Dogs remain the single biggest danger to adult kiwi in any new release area. The project has run an extensive education programme for dog owners on the city’s western coast, including kiwi avoidance training for working farm dogs and dog-walking pamphlets for everyone else. Traffic on rural roads is another known risk in any kiwi release area, and the trust has urged Wellingtonians who walk or drive in the western hills to be more careful at dusk and dawn, when kiwi are most active.

The Beehive welcome carried symbolic weight beyond conservation. Forest and Bird has previously described the project as a quiet but powerful reminder of what predator-managed urban areas can look like, and how quickly indigenous wildlife can come back when the predator load is taken away. The image of a kiwi stepping across the parliamentary mat will be the lasting picture of that idea.

Capital Kiwi has now turned its attention from translocation to long-term security. The next phase is about strengthening the trap network, expanding the predator-free footprint along the western coast, and helping other community groups apply the same template to their own coastlines. Ward said the hope is that other cities will look at what Wellington has done and ask whether the same thing could happen in their own backyard.

For the kiwi that walked across the parliamentary mat on Monday, the journey ended quietly. By Tuesday it was back in the bush, listening for other kiwi in the Mākara hills, with another century in front of it and, this time, every chance of company.

Have you spotted a wild kiwi in Wellington’s western suburbs, helped run a trap line, or been part of the Capital Kiwi volunteer effort? Tell us your story in the comments below — Newswire wants to hear how Wellingtonians are living alongside their returning national bird.