In the misty forests and windswept grasslands of New Zealand, a remarkable battle for survival is underway. Here, rare birds like the fuzzy, flightless kiwi and the hefty, moss-green kākāpō—found nowhere else on earth—are fighting for their very existence. Once thought extinct, these birds have staged a comeback against incredible odds, but their future now hangs by a thread, threatened by invasive predators that have reshaped New Zealand’s ecosystem over the past several centuries.
According to NPR, the kākāpō is the world’s only flightless parrot and, at up to eight pounds, the heaviest. Alongside it is the takahē, a striking grassland bird with a red beak and blue ombre feathers. These species, along with dozens of others, have survived for millennia on islands that, until human arrival, had no land mammals except bats. Raptors were once their only threat. But everything changed when Māori settlers arrived about 700 years ago, followed by Europeans in the 1800s. With them came rats, stoats, weasels, ferrets, and even possums—predators that quickly found easy prey among New Zealand’s ground-dwelling, often flightless birds.
The consequences have been dire. As reported by WhoWhatWhy, invasive predators have already driven 62 native bird species to extinction. Today, more than 80% of the remaining native birds that breed in New Zealand are at risk. It’s a crisis that has spurred one of the most ambitious conservation projects in the world: New Zealand’s goal to eradicate invasive predators by 2050. This effort, likely involving the removal of tens of millions of animals, is the largest invasive species removal project ever attempted anywhere, with an annual price tag estimated at over $100 million.
The government is leading the charge, but it’s not alone. Across the country, local volunteers are rolling up their sleeves and setting traps in their own backyards. These grassroots efforts, highlighted by WhoWhatWhy, have become a vital part of the campaign. Yet, as conservationists and rangers know all too well, manual trapping is labor-intensive and costly to scale up. That’s where technology comes in.
New Zealand is turning to cutting-edge tools to tip the balance in favor of its native birds. Automated traps powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are being deployed in forests and hillsides. These high-tech devices use cameras and machine learning to identify target species, triggering only when the culprit is a pest like a rat or possum. As Jonah Kitto-Verhoef of the Halo Project told NPR, “Machine learning and artificial intelligence can really help improve our work, save us a lot of time and money and actually make it so much more effective.” The traps even provide real-time data on what’s being caught and whether some animals are getting wise to the devices.
But even smart traps can’t cover every inch of the country. So researchers are also exploring genetic solutions. At the University of Otago, Associate Professor Tim Hore and his team have sequenced the genome of the brushtail possum, a notorious invader. This opens the door to developing species-specific toxins or even gene drives—genetic modifications that could, for instance, ensure only male offspring are born, gradually collapsing invasive populations. “Therefore, breeding slowly grinds to a halt,” Hore explained to NPR. However, he and other scientists warn of the need for caution; gene drives could have unintended effects if the modified animals spread beyond New Zealand’s borders.
All these efforts are underpinned by a sense of urgency and hope. The Takahē Recovery Program at the Burwood Takahē Centre, for example, has spent decades carefully rebuilding the takahē population from a handful of survivors rediscovered in 1948. At first, chicks were hand-reared by humans using takahē puppets, but now, as of 2025, the population has grown to over 500 birds, and parents raise their own chicks in outdoor enclosures. Glen Greaves, a ranger with the program, told NPR, “The lower the genetic diversity of species, the higher the infertility generally, and we’re starting from a very small population of takahē.”
Yet, even with these successes, safe habitats remain scarce. Stoats, introduced by Europeans to control rabbits, are relentless predators. “They are incredibly smart and incredibly desperate,” Greaves noted. “So they’ll ambush a big takahē, usually on its nest, just jump on the back of the bird and hang on for dear life until it’s dead.” Fences, like those at the Orokonui Ecosanctuary outside Dunedin, provide some refuge. These high-security barriers, reminiscent of something out of Jurassic Park, are designed to keep predators out rather than birds in. But even these aren’t foolproof—after a snowstorm, stoats once found a way over the fence, devastating a population of rare South Island saddlebacks.
Maintaining these sanctuaries is costly and laborious, so conservationists are keen to make progress outside their walls. Volunteers like Kitto-Verhoef, with the help of his specially trained border terrier Scout, use new tech such as heat-sensing drones to track and target possums. “If we didn’t do this, we’d be complicit in our native species going extinct,” he said.
Public support for predator eradication is strong, though not without debate. The SPCA, New Zealand’s animal rights organization, supports finding non-lethal control methods but recognizes the need for action. As Brent Beaven, manager of the Predator Free 2050 program at New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, put it to NPR, “Even if we realize it’s unrealistic, we’ll still be in a position where we’ve created a whole lot of new tools and technology that’s going to allow us to better protect our native wildlife. We should have thriving native wildlife in areas like we’ve never had before, so there is no loss to this.”
The stakes are not just ecological but cultural. For Madison Kelly, who works at the Orokonui Ecosanctuary and is of Māori heritage, the project is about more than birds. “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—our treasures, can be active here,” she told NPR.
As invasive species continue to spread globally, the world is watching New Zealand’s experiment. The lessons learned here could shape conservation efforts far beyond its shores. With determination, innovation, and a bit of Kiwi grit, New Zealand is racing to give its rarest birds a fighting chance—before it’s too late.
