Endangered
bird caught on camera in West Auckland
Community
Waitakere
The rare
and endangered Australasian Bittern/Matuku has been filmed by a remote camera
placed by Community Waitakere in Te Atatu Peninsula, West Auckland.
What
looked like a log in a suburban Auckland wetland has turned out to be one
of New Zealand's rarest and most endangered birds.
An
infrared camera set up for two days last week at the Orangihina Wetlands
in Te Atatū in West Auckland captured footage of the matuku,
also known as the Australasian bittern, wandering through the wetland.
Ecologist
Dion Pou from Community Waitakere said he reviewed footage on the camera on the
car ride back from the wetland thinking something had gone wrong with
his motion-sensitive camera.
"At
first I couldn't understand why this log had somehow gotten into the middle of
the frame."
Matuku
are secretive, rarely seen in pairs, shy away from other
animals and are almost never seen near cities, Pou said.
When the
Matuku tilts its head upwards it can look like a piece of dead wood.
Its
trademark gesture involves the bird tilting its head to the sky
exposing the markings on its neck making it look like a piece of dead wood
to onlookers.
Over the
last 50 years the matuku population has been in steep decline.
The bird
is large, the size of a small white-faced heron, but requires wetlands with clean
water to survive.
There are
fewer than 1000 matuku left in New Zealand and a similar number in
Australia along with around 50 in New Caledonia.
Pou said
those numbers made the matuku "as endangered as it gets" on a
global scale.
Michael
Coote from Forest and Bird said the discovery of the bird in suburban Auckland
was a testament to its survival skills.
In that
environment the bird would face threats from off-leash dogs, cats, stoats and
rats interested in its eggs.
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