Animal · New Zealand
Brown kiwi
Apteryx mantelli — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The brown kiwi is a flightless bird from New Zealand that hunts worms in the dark and smells them with nostrils at the tip of its bill. It is one of five kinds of kiwi and the only one living wild in the North Island. All of them are about the size of a chicken.
Picture credit: David Craig (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the brown kiwi live?
Home: forests and scrub in New Zealand.
In the wild it lives in these countries: New Zealand.
Conservation status from the IUCN: vulnerable.
The short profile
Fully grown: about 40 cm long. It weighs about 2.5 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
There are five species of kiwi and all of them live only in New Zealand; this page is about the brown kiwi of the North Island. A kiwi is about the size of a chicken, with loose feathers that feel like hair and wings so small you cannot see them. It sleeps in a burrow by day and comes out at night, tapping the ground with its long bill and sniffing through nostrils right at the tip, which no other bird has. Most of its food is earthworms, beetle grubs, spiders and weta, the big crickets of New Zealand. The female lays an egg that is huge for her body, weighing around 400 g, and the male sits on it for two to three months. Stoats, dogs and cats kill many young kiwi, so people trap predators and raise chicks in safe places until they are big enough to defend themselves.
Find it on the globe
Brown kiwi is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why can a kiwi not fly?
Its ancestors lived on islands where no land mammals hunted them, so wings were of little use and slowly shrank. Kiwi got strong legs instead, and they run and dig very well.
What does a kiwi sound like?
The male gives a high, shrill whistle repeated many times, and the female answers with a lower, rougher call. Pairs call in the dark to keep in touch across their patch of forest.
Is the kiwi still in danger?
Yes. Where nobody controls stoats and dogs, most chicks die in their first months, but in places with traps and safe nurseries the numbers are climbing again.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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