Kiwi makes itself at home in Russell woman’s kitchen

Russell local Tabatha Bird had an unexpected encounter when her cat flap became the entranceway for a kiwi.

After a skirmish with a frog her feline friend had trapped the previous night, the sounds of scuffling last week weren’t exactly welcome.

“I thought she’d [the cat] come in and bought a mouse. And hilariously the night before we’d had an incident with a screaming frog. So I was like... is it going to be a frog again?

“In the low light, I could see a long beak but I thought ‘That’s a weka, it must be a weka’.”

A flick of the torch revealed her new visitor was a young North Island brown kiwi.

“I just couldn’t comprehend what was happening, it was just entertaining, and it felt so crazy that he’d come through the cat flap.”

The kiwi’s chosen entrance had been propped open because her cat was still getting used to it, she said.

Bird spent the next few minutes procuring her cat during which time the kiwi had scurried from the kitchen and into the shower.

“The kiwi] was just chilling in the shower.

“It was just happily moseying about and I went through the process of trying to calmly get him out.”

A veterinary nurse, Bird was well-versed in dealing with animals, but a kiwi felt different, she said.

“They’re such a prized icon, it felt illegal to touch it, I [couldn’t] just pick him up.”

The kiwi took a leisurely tour of Tabatha Bird's home last week.

Bird managed to shuffle the kiwi out of the bathroom and eventually encouraged it into a courtyard and away from her property.

Having grown up in Northland, seeing kiwi wasn’t unusual for her, but she said this encounter was the most interesting.

What surprised her was how at ease the creature was, she said.

“He was so young, and they’re very curious creatures anyway.

He wasn’t too fussed.”

Bird said the visit had been reassuring for the Predator Free Russell group that worked hard to keep the area safe for native species.

Technical manager Niki Minchin said kiwi visits were becoming more prevalent with population growth.

“I hear stories every day now about how kiwi are coming up to porches and backyards.”

Minchin estimated about 2,000 kiwi live on the peninsula and numbers have grown over the last 20 years.

Bird’s encounter joined a list of interesting places kiwi have turned up - earlier this year sawmill workers in Whangārei were surprised by a fully grown kiwi, while last year a kiwi took a nap in a hen house.

Minchin believed the increase in sightings was a mixture of kiwi moving into suburbia and humans encroaching on their habitat.

Unfortunately, with that has come an increase in kiwi road deaths, Minchin said.

In the last year he has picked up nine dead kiwi off the road.

“We do report the deaths to DoC and they say it’s a good sign, that more kiwi are on the road which means there are more obviously out there, which is a hard pill to swallow.

“We have to accept that’s just part of the [growth] in numbers.”

But it remained equally important to ensure locals and visitors understood to watch out for kiwi on roads and control their dogs, he said.

More than 800 residents have been spoken to and agreed to have some form of pest control on their property.

The group was also working hard to erect signs near roads.

Brodie Stone is an education and general news reporter at the Advocate. She has spent most of her life in Whangārei and is passionate about delving into issues that matter to Northlanders and beyond.