A plague of stoats is decimating the wild population of one of New Zealand's rarest birds and a new plan has been formulated to save them from extinction.
Scores of the native takahe have been wiped out by feral stoats and Phil Tisch from the Department of Conservation says it has been a shock and a surprise.
"It's really hard going out and finding dead birds," says Tisch.
Some takahe are now being reared at Fiordland's Burwood Bush unit and although the numbers are quite low DOC spokeswoman Linda Kilduff says it is vital for the bird's continuing survival. She says it's a real privilege to experience the contact with the birds.
"The resident pairs here actually have a really important task to foster the chicks and teach them the skills needed to be returned to the mountains," says Kilduff.
Takahe Valley in the middle of the Murchison Mountains is a historic place for the takahe as it was where the bird was rediscovered in 1948. Before that, takahe were considered extinct.
Since humans arrived in New Zealand a thousand years ago more than a third of the land and freshwater birds have become extinct.
DOC is determined that won't happen to the takahe. Intensive conservation programmes have halted the bird's decline and about 70 are kept on off-shore, predator-free islands to keep them away from their worst enemy - the stoat.
Takahe have actually been observed to kill stoats and until recently no one thought that a 100 gram stoat could take on a 3 kilogram takahe and bring it down.
A recent census found takahe numbers in some areas are down by almost 60% - a lot for a bird with a total population of just over 200. Tisch says they found 94 birds in an area where they had hoped to find about 160.
Stoat traps are laid in about a third of the conservation area but after such devastating news the trapping programme has been extended to the full 50,000 hectares.
It will be the biggest stoat control area in the country.
"What we've discovered during this last year is that within this trapped area that we have, which is about 15,000 hectares, that we had a 2% increase in the number of takahe, even though we had a stoat plague...so we're pretty confident these traps are effective and work very well," says Nik Joice from DOC.
