Notiomystis cincta

Tiritiri Matangi Island is widely considered the crown jewel of New Zealand's conservation projects, a sanctuary that supports several species of very rare endemic birds that remains accessible to the public on a daily basis. During my stay I was able to see every species that has been successfully introduced to the island since its conversion to a reserve in the 1980s.

The bird presented above is one of the most treasured and heavily supported on the island, due to the fragility of its existence and its unique place in the avian world. It is the Hihi, a mid size passerine, endemic to the North Island and its surrounding offshore islands, that has no close relatives and as such resides in its own family, Notiomystidae. Up until recently it was thought to be one of the honeyeaters, a group of birds native to Australasia that includes NZ's Tui and Bellbird. In fact it is most closely related to the wattlebirds of New Zealand--an endemic family that now contains only two extant species--though only distantly so.

The Hihi, also known as a Stitchbird, is such a strikingly colorful and intriguing bird to behold, the explorer and early ornithologist Andreas Reischek recalled "watching its quiet and graceful movements without attempting to use my gun." It was once common throughout the North Island, but declined rapidly after European arrival, and was extirpated from the mainland by the 1880s. For one hundred years it clung to existence in one place: Little Barrier Island, a mountain of land in the Hauraki Gulf that because of its steep cliffs and poor anchorages was spared the throngs of settlers and farmers that cleared the Gulf islands of their native vegetation and brought with them rats, possums, dogs, and cats.

In the 1980s the New Zealand Wildlife Service (now the Department of Conservation) began moving Hihi to other offshore islands in an attempt to boost their numbers and establish multiple breeding populations. Doing so not only secured the species' survival in case of a crash of the Little Barrier population, it also made possible the potential to swap birds around the different sanctuaries and give the gene pool a good stir.

The first translocation of Hihi to Tiritiri Matangi was in 1995. Breeding has been successful there, though only tentatively so, as the native forest was only planted 20-30 years ago and there are not enough flowering trees and consequently nectar to go around. Intensive studies and monitoring of their nesting continues--while I was there I shared the bunkhouse with a guy from Washington state who is staying on the island for 5 months to observe daily their breeding, nesting, and parenting behaviour--and Hihi feeder stations are set up with nectar bottles across the island to supplement their diet.

This is a male in the picture. They are far more colourful than the females, with the brilliant yellow band around their wings and chest, and their white ear tufts, which perk up when they are aggravated. The females are brownish gray with a jagged white wing bar--equally lovely in their own way.

The common English name Stitchbird comes from their high-pitched "tsee-eet" call, that resembles the word stitch. Like their forest companions, the honeyeaters, they move about erratically, constantly twitching from side to side and flitting about. (This, in the darkness of the forest, makes them especially hard to photograph clearly, heh heh.) They compete with Tui and Bellbird for food sources, and are passive to them, one reason they struggle to grow in numbers. Uniquely for a NZ passerine of their size and demeanor, they nest high in tree cavities, though on Tiri they are provided nest boxes so that the chicks can be more closely monitored.

This one kind of gets me: the Hihi is the only bird in the world that mates face to face, as opposed to the male mounting the female from the back.

There have since been successful introductions to the mainland, in 2005 at Wellington's Karori Wildlife Sanctuary and in 2007 in the Waitakere Ranges near Auckland. The population is estimated around 1000 birds, including these two small populations on the mainland and the others on Little Barrier, Tiri, Kapiti, and Mokoia Island in Lake Rotorua.