Who ever knew kiwis were detail freaks?
Some of my wild favourite characters in New Zealand are kiwis, they are the iconic image of the land and are a very distinctive and peculiar type of bird, but just how idiosyncratic and nutty they are only became apparent as we filmed them.
They are birds, which do a seriously good impression of a mammal
We filmed with a habituated group of kiwi, which live as wild in a large forested enclosure at the Otorohanga Kiwi Sanctuary in the North Island. This meant cameraman Robert Morgenstern and his team could reveal the Kiwis’ secretive and strange intimate behaviour.
Until we made the series I had no idea that Kiwis lived in burrows! They are birds, which do a seriously good impression of a mammal; their feathers look more like fur, they have nostrils at the tip of their bills (unique in the bird world), and what look like whiskers around the front of their faces. So perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise that they make their homes underground.
Modern infra-red technology allowed us to peer where no human eye can. We first saw images of a carpet of fallen leaves, then some of those leaves seemed to heave and rustle, and a spiky fringe appeared, followed by two eyes. As if from nowhere, the head, neck, and very long beak of a kiwi rose out of what looked like flat forest floor. The kiwi pulled itself out and stretched his leg, more like an animatronic furry dinosaur puppet than a bird.
this male never seemed to let his baby out of beak range
The kiwi egg is one of the largest in proportion to body size of any bird. And although kiwis are about the size and weight of a large chicken they are, bizarrely and in true New Zealand fashion, more closely related to an Ostrich. We worked closely with Rainbow Spring Kiwi Hatchery to capture the moment when after a mammoth incubation a kiwi chick manages to punch its way out of its thick skinned egg.
The cameras revealed the true character of a kiwi who became my personal favourite, a particularly diligent male, who was clearly delighted with his infant. In Brown kiwi circles it’s the norm for the father to do the incubating, and most of the child care alone, so it was a joy to observe their first days together. Hatchling kiwis are very unsteady on their feet and this male never seemed to let his baby out of beak range, using it as a toddler’s rein. Every time he left the burrow the anxious dad carefully covered his entrance with a new pile of leaves. He was so considered and careful we gave the nick name of the detail freak. In this particular male kiwi’s life, everything had to be just so.
Brown kiwis forage on a beach in daylight
Cold nights and meagre pickings mean that this brown kiwi ventures out in daylight.
