Season's 100th Kiwi arrives

The 100th kiwi chick of the season has hatched at Rainbow Springs' Kiwi Encounter.

The new arrival, from the Coromandel region, weighed in at a healthy 331grams and needed a little bit of help to break out of its shell.


Whisker at three days old.

Kiwi Encounter Husbandry Manager Claire Travers says: 'The chick wasn't progressing quite as well as it should, so I helped it along by making a couple of lateral cracks in the egg shell to make the hatch process a little easier.”

The chick has been named Leslie by Kiwi Experience bus tour driver Jess Hitchman, who was very excited to take a group to Kiwi Encounter to see the chick.

Jess chose the name in recognition of iconic West Coast Lake Mahinapua Hotel owner Leslie, who passed away recently. The hotel is a regular stop for Kiwi Experience tours and Leslie was loved by all, says Jess.

Leslie's hatching comes after Whisker was brought to the encounter after being run over by a digger on the East Cape. Read more here.

Kiwi Encounter is a charitable trust and relies on funding to enable its kiwi conservation work to continue.

Eggs are brought in from around the upper North Island where they are incubated, hatched and nurtured until they weigh a healthy 1kg in weight, increasing their chances of survival in the wild. The chicks are then released back to their natural environment.

The sex of a chick isn't known at birth, and is revealed by DNA found at the tip of the feather shaft where it enters the bird's skin, and requires laboratory analyis at Massey University to determine.

Kiwi Encounter usually hatches around 120 eggs every season, the majority from the wild. Leslie was the 1423rd kiwi chick to hatch at Kiwi Encounter.


Kiwi chick #100 with Claire Travers, left, and the real Leslie, right.

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1 comment

Good News

Posted on 27-02-2015 14:59 | By carpedeum

Really LOVE reading stuff like this- makes a welcome change from the violence,death,and destruction. GREAT NEWS and long may they keep it up


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