Being a baby bird’s best buddy

“Go away cat! Argh, get out of it, you &*^&%&*!”

 I’m swearing at camera footage from a couple of nights ago.

There’s a cat taking a very long and interested look at a burrow I care for as part of Karioi Project’s Burrow Buddy programme, which runs during the nesting season of ōi/grey-faced petrel around Raglan’s coastline.

The cat is butt deep in the entranceway of burrow RW1. There is a nice healthy chick inside, which I’d just seen on the video footage taking part in nightly wing flapping exercises in preparation for fledging.

The cat has been hanging around this burrow quite a bit over the past few weeks, but thankfully loses interest.

I’ve seen a number of predators on the footage from field cameras on ōi burrows during the 2023 nesting season, and each is capable of snuffing out the life of an egg or a chick. Rats, hedgehogs, possums, dogs; there’s even been a ferret lurking about, and which has evaded capture.

With all this predatory activity, and not much that can be done apart from swearing at camera footage after the fact and keeping up with the servicing of traps, it’s not surprising that from about 50 active burrows at the beginning of the nesting season, just six ōi chicks made it through to fledge.

However, that’s more than zero, which is what it was when the Karioi Project first started its intensive trapping programme on Karioi maunga about 15 years ago.

The first chick to hatch as part of the project did so in 2017, but since then more than 50 in total have made their way to a life at sea.

Ōi are endemic to New Zealand and only come to land to breed.

Once upon a time, there would have been raucous, stinking colonies of seabirds breeding around all of New Zealand’s coastline, but habitat loss and introduced predators have put paid to that.

Luckily, ōi are quite a resilient bunch. They’re generalist feeders and quite happy to nest under someone’s kayak or spa pool (well, in Raglan at least), which makes them a bit more adaptable than some other seabirds.

Even so, eggs and chicks are no match for predation, therefore most of the successful, larger breeding colonies are found on offshore predator-free islands.

Only about 20 per cent of ōi colonies are on the mainland, and they’re small, found as far south as Taranaki on the west coast and the Mahia peninsula on the east.

Their breeding success is largely reliant on there being a community predator management programme in place, such as the Karioi Project.

Breeding happens from April to May, when paired birds return to the land for courtship, to clear or excavate their burrows and get jiggy, before heading out to sea again.

In July, they’re back again to lay a single egg, with both parents sharing the care for the egg (55 days of incubation) and then the hatched chick (120 days to fledging).

It’s a precarious time being an ōi chick.

The chicks are left alone in their burrow for up to five days at a time while mum and dad fly up to 600 kilometres in search of food for them.

Despite this lengthy time away, field cameras have shown ōi to be good parents; instead of simply returning to the nest to regurgitate a meal down their young one’s neck and gapping it, there is always time for a snuggle and a preen; and the setting of the burrow in order again.

I was one of seven rostered burrow buddies working the Raglan coastline during the 2023 nesting season, making sure every ōi burrow got checked twice a week. We also had an ōi burrow from a previous year occupied by a pair of kororā/little blue penguin.

I do this volunteer work because I like birds, and I’m writing this because I work for Waikato Regional Council’s comms team, and the council has contributed $464,756 over four years towards Karioi Project’s efforts to restore the coastal forest of Mt Karioi and its native birdlife. 

Burrow buddies retrieve and review camera footage, move cameras between the burrows, clear any vegetation in front of the cameras so they’re not taking footage of waving pampas or fern fronds, and check nearby traps.

As there are not enough cameras to go around all the burrows, activity is also monitored by shoving four popsicle sticks into the ground across every burrow entrance.

Finding ‘down’ sticks may signify either the entry and exit of parent birds; the exit and entry of a chick; or the entry and exit of something far more sinister – like that fluffy-bummed cat I saw a lot of on camera.

Ōi chicks start to leave the burrows for an hour or so at a time as they approach fledging.

The wing flapping exercises they engage in helps build muscle for flight but also ensures they drop in weight from about 1 kilogram to 500-550 grams so they can get off and stay off the ground when it comes to taking their maiden journey.

The chick in burrow RW1 made its last cameo appearance on camera on 19 December at about 9.30pm, before wandering off, never to be seen again returning to the burrow.

But hopefully, he or she will return in a few years as a mature bird, to eventually become part of Raglan’s breeding colony.