ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Some endangered species have been saved in the nick of time, right before extinction. And their populations are growing through breeding programs. The problem is many of these species don't have a safe place to return to in the wild. NPR's Lauren Sommer reports from New Zealand on what happens when animals are stuck in human care.
LAUREN SOMMER, BYLINE: The takahe is a bird that's back from the dead. Around 1900, the flightless birds were thought to be completely extinct in New Zealand. Now you can see one.
JAMES BOHAN: So we're seeing Hopi gently creep out, and he knows it's dinnertime.
SOMMER: James Bohan is dropping some food pellets for Hopi, the takahe.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOTTLE OF PELLETS RATTLING)
SOMMER: He's site lead at the Burwood Takahe Centre, a breeding program on New Zealand's South Island. The bird walking out of the brush is the size of a rooster, with blue feathers and a red beak.
The colors are really amazing.
BOHAN: Yeah, the deep blues running right through to the turquoise and indigos. It's quite a special-looking bird.
SOMMER: Glen Greaves is a ranger at the Takahe Recovery Program. He says these birds are only found in New Zealand. They became flightless because they had no predators on the ground. There were no land mammals at all in New Zealand. That changed when European settlers arrived and brought a relative of the weasel - the stoat. Stoats are, like, the terminator for New Zealand birds.
GLEN GREAVES: They are incredibly smart and incredibly desperate. So they'll ambush a big takahe - usually on its nest - just jump on the back of the bird and hang on for dear life until it's dead.
SOMMER: Takahe disappeared until 1948, when a small group was found in a remote valley. Over the decades, this captive breeding program has built up their numbers.
BOHAN: Yeah, so here we are at the actual nest.
SOMMER: It's woven from the tall grasses that surround it. Greaves is checking on two eggs and uses a flashlight to illuminate the inside of them. He's looking for an embryo that's moving but doesn't find one.
GREAVES: So that's bad news.
SOMMER: The second egg also isn't viable.
GREAVES: The more inbred, the lower the genetic diversity of a species, the higher the infertility, generally. And we're starting from a very small population of takahe.
SOMMER: So the team destroys the nest.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRIED GRASS CRUNCHING)
SOMMER: That'll prompt the birds to lay new eggs, instead of waiting on ones that won't hatch. The takahe pair isn't happy about it.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRD CALLS)
SOMMER: Despite this setback, takahe numbers are growing. There are now more than 500. So the issue is finding safe places for them to live.
GREAVES: There's lots of good habitat but very few places where we can control predators to the level - to the critical threshold that enable takahe to survive.
SOMMER: So instead of going into the wild, most takahe go somewhere else.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING)
MADISON KELLY: So this is the fence.
SOMMER: Madison Kelly is standing next to a 6-foot-tall fortified metal fence at the Orokonui Ecosanctuary outside Dunedin, New Zealand.
Do people ever say this looks like Jurassic Park?
KELLY: Yes (laughter). Yes, that's the very first thing my dad said when I took him here (laughter).
SOMMER: This fence isn't designed to keep things in. It keeps things out, including stoats and other invasive predators. The top is curved outward so nothing can climb over it. There's an electric wire on top, which triggers an alarm. There's 24/7 monitoring and a code to get in.
KELLY: And that changes every day.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR OPENING)
SOMMER: Inside, native birds are able to thrive.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING)
SOMMER: And that includes...
KELLY: Oh, that's the chick.
SOMMER: This is the chick.
A pair of takahe that just had a chick.
KELLY: This type of stuff is very inspiring.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING)
SOMMER: Kelly says that's especially true for her because of her Indigenous Maori heritage.
KELLY: You know, Orokonui is obviously a biodiversity project, but it's also a community project - a place where some of our stories, our forests, our species, our taoka, so our traditions, can be active here.
SOMMER: Still, protecting these birds takes constant vigilance. After a big snowstorm one year, stoats somehow got over the fence. It was when a very rare bird - the South Island saddleback - was living in the sanctuary.
KELLY: They basically were picked off one by one by those stoats. It took months and months and months to actually track down those stoats.
SOMMER: That work, and building the fence in the first place, means ecosanctuaries can cost millions of dollars. Now, New Zealand has moved on to a bigger idea to help the native birds - trying to make the entire country safe by eradicating the invasive predators by 2050. That will mean killing off millions of stoats and rats. John Innes studies conservation at the New Zealand Institute for Bioeconomy Science, a national research lab. He says he'd rather see the focus on building eco sanctuaries instead of the nationwide eradication.
JOHN INNES: I think the idea has been unhelpful - predator-free by 2050. Just to be clear, I think, of course, the vision is wonderful. Who could disagree with that? Of course it's good. But we have ended up spending tens of millions of dollars now for several years, and people are not building things that we know work.
SOMMER: Either way, Innes says saving New Zealand's birds will take a monumental effort to undo the damage that humans have done.
Lauren Sommer, NPR News.
SHAPIRO: And this story was produced by Ryan Kellman. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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