Kiwi!

POSTED BY IZZY

Oh my god! A kiwi! A real live kiwi, at last. We've been waiting to see a kiwi in its natural habit but after a week of searching, we decided we would have to go and see it in a kiwi zoo. 

So when we stopped off in the rainforest campsite (which happens to be situated in a real rainforest, pretty cool huh?) we saw that there is a kiwi zoo 5 minutes from our campsite! What a stroke of luck. 

So we went down to the west coast wildlife centre, I believe it is called, and checked ourselves in for an all day pass. Before we went into the sanctuary, we had to put blue foot coverings on for some reason unbeknownst to me and it seems the rest of the group as well!

Our tour guide was called Emma. She was very chatty and seemed interested in answering Maddie's never ending list of questions *rolls eyes*. She told us at first what species they had: I think it was rowi and one that I can't remember the name of but I know it was translated from the Maori into bird with a stick?! Then she took us down to another room with a door leasing off to it with a real kiwi egg inside, there was no kiwi in it but there was once. 

She was telling us about, when the chicks were merely 24 hours old, stoats would eat them and only 5% of kiwi babies lived to a year.

Kiwi's have no natural predators in New Zealand, but stoats, introduced by Europeans, have killed off huge numbers of kiwi so that they are now all endangered. 

She said that when the kiwi babies were "stoat proof" as she called them, they let them back out into the wild. "Stoat proof" is basically a way of saying about one year old. When they are that age, they are heavy. Even though they are the size of a chicken they weigh about 2.5kg! So they could easily fight off a stoat. 

Not only the weight, their claws were massive, so they would go straight through a stoat.

Ok, enough blab, you wanna know what they were actually like to look at, well here you go:

Cool isn't it! 

So there you go! There are your kiwi facts of the day!