National Geographic

still be nesting in burrows in the forest.The tract of forest where the Moriori had col-lected taiko was owned by a sheep farmer of Maoridescent, Manuel Tuanui. Inspired by the pros-pect of discovering a lost native bird on their land,Tuanui and his teenage son, Bruce, helped Crock-ett conduct a series of arduous searches for thetaiko, scouring the forest for burrows and settingup spotlights to attract seabirds flying in at night.To Bruce, Crockett was “this strange guy who waschasing a taipo [a Maori word for ‘ghost’].” WhenBruce married a young woman from a neighbor-ing island, Liz Gregory-Hunt, she was swept upin his family’s quest. “You get sucked into thevortex,” Liz told me, “and it becomes your life.”On the night of January 3, 1973, Crockett wasrewarded with a spotlighted look at four birdsthat matched the description of Magenta petrel:ocular proof. But he also wanted to capture taikoand find where they nested, and this was evenharder than seeing them. It was another fiveyears before Bruce and Liz, driving into townfrom the farm, were stopped on the road byan uncle of Bruce’s who gave them the news:“They’ve just caught two taiko.” It was a furtherten years before a team of scientists was able tolocate two active taiko burrows in the forest, byradio-tracking captured birds.For the Tuanuis, this was still only the begin-ning. The taiko’s single known breeding site wason their land, and the bird needed to be protectedfrom the threats that had already nearly drivenit extinct. Lines of traps were set around theburrows for cats and opossums, and ManuelTuanui, in a move considered “mental” by hisneighbors, donated 2,900 acres of bush to theNew Zealand government, which fenced most ofthe land against sheep and cattle. Within a fewyears, because of the family’s eforts, the num-ber of pairs of taiko known to breed in the forestbegan to rise; today it stands at more than 20.On a hot day in January, I joined a Britishseabird specialist, Dave Boyle, and a Britishvolunteer worker, Giselle Eagle, on a long trekto the burrow of a female taiko known to themas S64. She was incubating an egg fertilized bya male that had lived in the area for 18 seasonsbefore attracting a mate. Boyle wanted to exam-ine S64 before her egg hatched and she beganto spend more time foraging at sea. “There’s noway of knowing how old she is,” he said. “Shecould have been breeding somewhere else witha diferent partner, or she could be very young.”The terrain was rugged, the forest dense andintermittently boggy. S64’s burrow was tuckedinto a steep hillside covered thickly with fernsand tree litter. Boyle knelt down and removedthe lid of an underground wooden nest box pre-viously installed at the back end of the burrow.Peering in, he shook his head sadly. “It looks likethe chick got stuck hatching.”Chick death is not uncommon, especially if themother is young and inexperienced, but everybreeding failure is a setback for a species whosetotal population is still only about 200. Boylereached into the box and lifted out S64. She wasbig for a petrel but seemed small in his hands,and she had no idea how rare and precious shewas; she squirmed and tried to bite Boyle untilhe slipped her into a cloth bag. To discourage herfrom hanging around the burrow any longer, heremoved the dead chick and the crumpled shellthat had trapped its legs. Working with Eagle,he then fastened a band to S64’s leg, stuck herwith a needle to draw a DNA sample, and shot amicrochip under the skin on her back.“She’s not having a good day,” Eagle said.“Once she’s got a microchip in,” Boyle said,“we never have to handle her again.”The few taiko that survived after centuries ofpredation and habitat loss nested deep in the for-est because it was relatively safe, not because itwas an optimal site. To get airborne, even adulttaiko need to climb a tree, and it can take a newfledgling several days to fight its way out of theforest, a struggle that may leave it too weak to sur-vive on the ocean. When the Tuanui family cre-ated a formal organization, the Chatham IslandsTaiko Trust, in 1998, one aim was to raise off-island money for a predator-proof enclosure closerto the water. The enclosure, called Sweetwater,was completed in 2006, and many of the chicksnow born in the forest are transferred there beforefledging, to “imprint” the location on their mem-ory and encourage them to return there to breed.The first Sweetwater-imprinted taiko returnedin 2010; many more have come back since then.The Taiko Trust has also transferred chicks ofthe Chatham petrel, a bird smaller and scarcelyless endangered than the taiko, from a nearbyisland to Sweetwater, to create a secure alternatenesting site for the species. To bolster the popu-lation of the Chatham albatross, a species whoseonly colony is on Te Tara Koi Koia, a constrictingofshore cone of rock also known as the Pyra-mid, the trust has ferried 300 chicks to a second142 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC