One Female Left: The Incredible Survival of New Zealand’s Black Robin

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

You're listening to an AirWave Media Podcast.

SPEAKER_2 (0:04)

College football is back, so Hilton called on me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Wanna make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky.

Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 555 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on the same day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

SPEAKER_1 (0:35)

This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom.

For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom...

SPEAKER_2 (0:52)

Nordstrom. Big or small, we're here for all of it.

SPEAKER_1 (0:55)

Celebrating 125 years with new moments still ahead. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

Chris (1:25)

Welcome to All Creatures Podcast, this is Chris. Today, we're going to talk about, I would consider one of Conservation's greatest stories up to this date. It's not a victory quite yet, but things are looking good for this species. Imagine one female left of a species, and now there are hundreds of this bird flying around small islands off New Zealand. Today is the story of the Karure or Black Robin, or the Chatham Black Robin specifically, that just recently was voted Bird of the Year here in New Zealand. That's now world famous thanks to John Oliver, who was spoofing the Bird of the Year. And the Black Robin or the Maori name is Karure is found nowhere else on earth. This particular species evolved in the Chatham Islands, which sit about 800 kilometers, so just over 400 miles east of New Zealand's South Island. And like the main islands of New Zealand, there were no mammalian predators.

But what we've learned over the last two centuries is like so many islands around the world and these species that live on them, as soon as humans started to populate them, everything changed. These human settlements absolutely transformed the landscape, cleared the habitat for farming, and unfortunately, introduced predators. And for the black robin, that included rats and cats that went through an ecosystem whose native birds have never evolved to deal with them. And like the kakapo and even to the kiwi and other birds of New Zealand, the black robin, the consequences were devastating. I mean, its range began to shrink and shrink and shrink until eventually, the species was hanging on in just one little place, little Mangere Island. And this island is tiny, it's remote, these sub-Anartic, almost sub-Anartic islands, steep cliffs, very difficult to access. I mean, you're talking 37 acres. So the Black Robin, which was on the Chatham Island chain, all of a sudden is left on one tiny little island. And by the 1970s, so this is 50 years ago, conservationists were starting to realize just how bad things had become. In 1972, Wildlife Officers for the Department of Conservation in New Zealand could only find 18 Black Robins.

Then four years later in 1976, that number had fallen to seven.

And I mean, at that point, the species looks done, right? I mean, there's not many margins left for them. At that point, things look really dire for the species. So conservationists made a really extraordinary decision. Those remaining birds were moved from little Mangere Island to the nearby bigger Mangere Island, which is like 280 acres. And interestingly, and we'll talk a little bit more about this in a minute, but this is where habitat restoration was already underway.

And when you think about that, think about the stakes involved in a decision like that. You have seven birds left on earth of a species. And I mean, this kind of harkens a little bit to what's going on with the Vaquita porpoise in the Sea of Cortez in Baja California. But here you have tiny little birds, seven of them. So you're going to catch them, hopefully without harming them. Then you're going to move them, release them somewhere else. So this is a new home, even though it's nearby, it's a new home to them. You know, they don't know the landscape. They don't know the trees and all of them. And then hope they survive. Remember, seven.

Because the decision they're faced with is if we do nothing, that pretty much can mean we're watching the species completely disappear.

But even after they moved the seven, the decline continued by 1980 So 46 years ago, as I record this today, there was only five black robins left in the world. Five.