When a male South Island robin is in want of a mate, he sings. It’s not a glamorous sound, says ecologist Manaia Pearmain-Fenton. Plee plee plee / chee chee chee. Loud, plinky, like a kid picking at a keyboard.
Pearmain-Fenton has whakapapa to Ngāti Hokopū, Ngāti Awa and Te Whakatōhea in the Bay of Plenty. She uses a Ngāi Tahu name for the robins: kakaruwai, a word that describes their expressive, emotion-filled eyes. The robins are friendly—they won’t usually flit around you in the bush, like pīwakawaka, but they’ll park up and watch from a log. Or perch on your boot. “Sweet,” she calls them. “Feisty.” Over the decades we have let these birds disappear.
Half an hour from Dunedin city there’s a reserve called Silver Stream. Go there this spring and you’ll probably hear the males singing. You might think: how lovely, so many birds! But the males are singing into the void. In this spot, there are no females left.
Pearmain-Fenton told me a story about the robins in this reserve, and I have been thinking about it for weeks now.
In 2022, she wanted to study the breeding behaviour of kakaruwai. She searched the bush at Silver Stream; it was one of the last two wild places on the east coast where the robins were hanging on. Three times a week she visited. Finally, after “months and months and months”, she found one female. That bird had a mate. Twice, the pair nested and hatched chicks. Twice, the chicks were taken by stoats.
The robins persisted, building precariously high this time, on a branch too spindly for a stoat. One morning, when the chicks were new, Pearmain-Fenton went to check on the family after a heavy wind. The parents were frantic. The nest was upside-down in the middle of the track. She could hear the chicks peeping underneath. She didn’t know what to do: parents often abandon chicks after they’re handled. “But I couldn’t leave them.”
She put gloves on, tucked the chicks into the nest, and reached up as high as she could to lodge it in a fork. In a place with no predator control, she knew it was almost guaranteed to fail. She considered sleeping by the tree overnight, but it was too cold, and anyway, she couldn’t sleep there every night. When she got back into reception, she called DOC and the Dunedin wildlife hospital. Interfering any more was too much of a risk, they told her. Other fieldwork kept her away for two weeks. She thought about the kakaruwai all the time. When she came back, heart in her mouth, the first thing she saw was an empty nest.
“But then I saw the parents, and I saw three chicks had fledged. All three had survived, by some miracle.”
That could well be the last clutch of kakaruwai raised at Silver Stream. The last nest. The population is now functionally extinct. “Preventable collapse,” Pearmain-Fenton says. She took it hard. She took a year away from science. But then she came back, and has just published her master’s on the rebound of the robins at nearby Orokonui Ecosanctuary (see page 17). There are more than 1000 robins inside that reserve, so many that they’re spilling out—and surviving—past the predator-proof fences. Pearmain-Fenton still feels burned out sometimes, or hopeless. But she tells herself, now, that maybe it doesn’t matter about the scale. “Doing something is better than doing nothing.”
You’re holding the 200th issue of New Zealand Geographic. There is much more to do. May we keep watch. May we keep working. May the bush at Silver Stream, one day, ring with noisy robins—not just males clamouring for a mate, but the gentler, quieter song they shift into when a female finally answers.
More by Catherine Woulfe