In honor of Kahurangi, I will continue to talk about the other awesome birds we came across in Aotearoa. I mentioned in that post that each conservation area we went to had a different bird taxa stand out. Kapiti Island was no different. In fact it might have been my favorite interaction. For it was an interaction that should have happened throughout islands worldwide.

Weka (Gallirallus australis) are large, curious, flightless rails once found throughout New Zealand. Again, with the effects of habitat destruction and introduced invasive species, weka have gone into decline in many areas. But being larger and fairly adaptable, they have held out longer than many other New Zealand endemic birds. In fact, weka have made it difficult to get certain New Zealand birds established through their predation. There are certain island sanctuaries where weka have to be managed.

Kapiti Island, off the southern most end of North Island, has a robust population of weka. I still remember what the docent told us. After a 15 minute nauseating ferry ride (I get seasick easily), the docent told us daytrippers about the various places we could explore. She recommended the hike up the hill where we could get a commanding view of the island and surrounding ocean as well as a neat surprise. I really had no idea what she meant, but it sounded interesting.

We were some of the first of the day to summit the hill on Kapiti Island. While it indeed was a great view, at first we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. When suddenly…

…Out of the bushes, 2 weka appeared! They were quite curious, walking calmly between all the hikers. They hung around for quite sometime before melting back into the bush.

It was a moment that really stuck with me because of the sad history of flightless rails in general. Rails are birds that can travel long distances, easily reaching remote island. But once there, they had a really high propensity to lose the ability to fly. Many many islands would have had their own population of flightless rails, thriving until the arrival of man. We’ve lost probably hundreds of species just of flightless rallidae in the last several hundred years. A couple (Wake Island, Laysan) almost made it to the present day only to fall as collateral damage of WWII. Today in the Pacific, there are only a small handful of islands that still have flightless rails. Guam, Calayan, Henderson, and the islands of Aoteraroa like Kapiti.

O`ahu, where I live, would have had several species of flightless rails living sympatrically. I’m not sure how dominant they would have been, but flightless rails would have certainly been a major component of the understorey of Hawaiian forests. To me they would have added a distinctive character unlike any mainland forest: Birds doing their darndest to fill the Raccoon/Possum niche. But they have been gone from O`ahu for centuries now. When I sat on that hill on Kapiti island, surrounded by cheeky birds that lost their gift of flight, I could not help but think of an alternate future where all the world’s island still have their precious flightless birds. For me, coming face to face with a flightless island bird was magic. It was a window to the world as it once was.