This may imitate the sound of the kiwi's call, or it may be derived from the Polynesian name, kivi, used for the bristle-thighed curlew, a large brown wader with a long decurved bill, that superficially resembles a kiwi.
Tokoeka is also a Maori name - meaning "weka with a walking stick". Maori knew Great Spotted Kiwi as roa or roroa.
These early migrants were the first to hunt the kiwi for its meat, skin and feathers, using Polynesian dogs (kuri) and traps. However, they did so sparingly and with great ceremony. Kiwi are under the special protection of Tane, god of the forest. Te manu huna a Tane ("the hidden bird of Tane") is kiwi’s ceremonial name.
Follow the links below to find out more about humans' early impacts:
Treasured Cloaks – Kahukiwi
Maori used kiwi feathers for ceremonial cloaks, called kahukiwi. These cloaks are made of a flax fabric, with the feather shafts woven into the flax to secure them. Usually the feathers are sewn on with the fluffy underside of the feather facing outwards. Sometimes whole kiwi skins are sewn together to make cloaks, with the feathers still attached.
Only Maori chiefs were allowed to eat kiwi meat and wear the soft kahukiwi, and special chants and rituals took place before a kiwi hunt began.
But life for kiwi was about to get much worse. Europeans were on their way.
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Europeans Arrive
Before Europeans stepped ashore in Aotearoa New Zealand, kiwi numbered in the millions. At the turn of the 20th century the kiwi population is estimated to have been 23 million. By the 1920s that had fallen to 5 million. Within just 200 years the birds had become the tragic victims of deliberate hunting, incidental predation and habitat loss.
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Kiwi first came to European attention in 1811 when a sealer sold a kiwi skin to a sea captain in Sydney Harbour. It ended up in England in the hands of George Shaw, a British Museum zoologist. Shaw gave kiwi its scientific name, Apteryx australis – “Southern bird with no wings.” He also published a description, with an artist’s impression of what a live and kicking kiwi might look like. It was a skinny, upright thing, not unlike a penguin. |
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The Great Kiwi Hoax
The 1813 publication caused a sensation. Some thought it a hoax, a crazy stitched-together skin from a number of different creatures - in the same way as they had believed the Australian platypus was a made-up joke. But over the next few years more reports and skins came in, confirming the kiwi's existence. In 1851 a live female kiwi arrived at London Zoo, where she lived alone for 15 years, laying eggs that could never be fertilised.
Meanwhile new human arrivals were flooding New Zealand – adventurers, surveyors, bushmen, gold miners and hunters. These people grew expert at hunting for food, though not all found kiwi meat to their taste.
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Tough as Old Boots
Surveyor, explorer and naturalist, Charles Douglas, described how, with a sprained ankle, he took several days to crawl back to his camp. On his agonising journey he came upon a pair of kiwi in their burrow. “Being punished with hunger, I ate the pair of them. Under the circumstances, I would have eaten the last of the dodos...the best definition about roast or boiled kiwi I ever heard was a man remarking it tasted as he should imagine a piece of pork boiled in an old coffin would taste like.”
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Kiwi are Fashion Victims
Europeans gave kiwi no special place in their culture and kiwi hunting gained terrifying momentum. Overseas museums paid high prices for kiwi skins, and the 1870s London and German fur trades were hungry for the soft, grey pelts of the Little Spotted Kiwi. Kiwi became fashion victims, slaughtered in their thousands to become muffs and hat trimmings.
Queerly, the Animal Protection Act of 1867 gave protection to exotic, introduced game animals, but not to New Zealand’s native animals and birds.
However, by the late 19th century, people began to realise the unique value of our native species. Nature reserves were set up and, finally, in 1896 the kiwi was declared a protected species.
The following year, Kapiti Island was established as a nature preserve and during the early 1900s many birds and plants were taken to its sanctuary, including the Little Spotted Kiwi. Today, other than a small population in Karori Sanctuary, in Wellington city, this species is extinct on the mainland.
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Invisible Demise
Meanwhile, kiwi were under attack from cats, stoats, weasels and ferrets, and dogs. And their habitat was under attack, with massive tracts of bush were cleared for pasture.
During much of the last century few people paid much attention to how kiwi were doing. They could still be heard calling at night, they were protected by law, and they had become such an icon, such an important symbol for Kiwis, that no-one could ever imagine kiwi could be in trouble.
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Silent Nights
The first worrying reports began in the 1980s. People who visited New Zealand’s backcountry, trampers and hunters, began to notice a silence. Nightly kiwi calls were disappearing from places they had always been common. Signs of kiwi - their footprints, beak probes, new burrows - were becoming rare.
In 1992 and 1993 a nation wide survey of kiwi was carried out by the Department of Conservation. Its results were measured against a survey done 20 years earlier by the then Wildlife Service.
The survey confirmed the worst - the reports were true, kiwi were in serious trouble, their populations in steep decline.
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