Watching Birds in New Zealand with Brent Stephenson 

New Zealand is famous for its epic landscapes. It’s become a favorite place for filmmakers who want dramatic scenery. But New Zealand is also known for having unique and unusual wildlife, particularly its birds. There are more than 370 species of birds that can be found in New Zealand, about a quarter of which are found nowhere else on Earth.

Brent Stephenson knows New Zealand’s birds better than just about anybody. He’s an ornithologist with a Ph.D. in Zoology from Massey University who has led birding expeditions in New Zealand and around the world. At one point he held the record for the most birds seen in New Zealand by a person in a single year! One species, the New Zealand storm petrel, was thought to be extinct until Brent spotted one in 2003. Brent is also a photographer and author of the book, Birds of New Zealand: A Photographic Guide. 

Join Wild World host Scott Solomon on a trip to New Zealand with the Rice Alumni Traveling Owls! The Traveling Owls program offers exciting intellectual itineraries to destinations across the globe. You don’t have to be a Rice alum to participate in Traveling Owls programs. Scott will be hosting a Traveling Owls trip to New Zealand in December 2025 on a custom itinerary by International Seminar Design, Inc. Visit https://alumni.rice.edu/travelingowls/new-zealand-wonders for details or call ISDI at 202-244-1448 to sign up!

More info about New Zealand birds:

https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/birds/ 

https://www.expeditions.com/expedition-stories/stories/slideshow-the-birds-of-new-zealand 

More info about New Zealand

https://www.britannica.com/place/New-Zealand 

This episode of Wild World was produced by 3WireCreative with support from the Rice Alumni Traveling Owls.

Help support this podcast and future episodes by checking out Autio, the perfect travel companion app for more engaging road trips. Autio is a network of stories, told by master storytellers like Kevin Costner, Phil Jackson, and John Lithgow, with the power to bring the landscape, its people, and its history alive as you pass through it. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Traveling Owls New Zealand v2

Discovering the Natural Wonders of New Zealand Feat. Scott Solomon, Teaching Professor of BioSciences. Perched in a gentle climate on the edge of the South Pacific, New Zealand is in many ways a world of its own. From an evolutionary standpoint, its topographical diversity and relative isolation kept it quite unique from other land masses. https://alumni.rice.edu/travelingowls/new-zealand-wonders

Rice Traveling Owls

Traveling Owls New Zealand

Discovering the Natural Wonders of New Zealand Feat. Scott Solomon, Teaching Professor of BioSciences. Perched in a gentle climate on the edge of the South Pacific, New Zealand is in many ways a world of its own. From an evolutionary standpoint, its topographical diversity and relative isolation kept it quite unique from other land masses. https://alumni.rice.edu/travelingowls

Rice Traveling Owls

Traveling Owls New Zealand

Discovering the Natural Wonders of New Zealand Feat. Scott Solomon, Teaching Professor of BioSciences. Perched in a gentle climate on the edge of the South Pacific, New Zealand is in many ways a world of its own. From an evolutionary standpoint, its topographical diversity and relative isolation kept it quite unique from other land masses. https://alumni.rice.edu/travelingowls

Rice Traveling Owls

Traveling Owls New Zealand v2

Discovering the Natural Wonders of New Zealand Feat. Scott Solomon, Teaching Professor of BioSciences. Perched in a gentle climate on the edge of the South Pacific, New Zealand is in many ways a world of its own. From an evolutionary standpoint, its topographical diversity and relative isolation kept it quite unique from other land masses. https://alumni.rice.edu/travelingowls/new-zealand-wonders

Rice Traveling Owls

WildWorld_NewZealand_final01

But what would've happened if mammals never existed? There's one place where we can go to get a glimpse of what a world without mammals might be like instead of mammals. Birds evolved to fill all of those roles. Some of them became giants, some just bizarre and. Well, they became curious, smart, and a little mischievous.

Scott Solomon: Woo, this is Wild World. I'm Scott Solomon, and in this episode we're traveling to a place where evolution has taken some creative twists and turns.

New Zealand is famous for its epic landscapes. It's become a favorite place for filmmakers who want dramatic scenery like in the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit series. It's stunning coastlines, forests and mountains are just spectacular. But New Zealand is also known for having unique and unusual wildlife.

There are more than 370 species of birds that can be found in New Zealand, about a quarter of which are found nowhere else on earth. If you wanna learn about interesting and unusual birds, New Zealand is a place you should get to know and maybe even visit. Brent Stevenson knows New Zealand's birds better than just about anybody.

He's an ornithologist, a biologist who studies birds, and he has a PhD in Zoology from Massey University in New Zealand where he is from. He has led birding expeditions and other trips in New Zealand and around the world, including with his own company, Ry Bill Birding Tours, as well as with our friends at National Geographic Linblad Expeditions.

This is your, your home country. It's a place where you've worked and traveled and taken other people to visit quite extensively. And I know we are gonna talk a lot about some of the amazing animals and birds in particular that live in New Zealand. But to get us started, can we just talk a little bit about New Zealand itself and why it is such a unique and special place when it comes to the types of things that live there?

It's, it's isolated, but it broke away from the Gond Island incontinent, the last remaining sort of fragment that broke away from Australia anywhere from 70 to 80 million years ago. And

Scott Solomon: this is that super continent, right? I mean, it was, ano was like, I mean the southern land Mass, south America, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, Australia, an Antarctica and Australia.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. And New Zealand and

Brent Stephenson: Exactly. Yeah. So New Zealand was the last sort of fragment to break away from that, about 70 to 80 million years ago. And it was really a time before mammals had really had their big expansion. And so as New Zealand broke away, it, it took. What were probably some little proto mammals, some sort of pre mammalian creatures.

So it didn't have rats, didn't have cats, didn't have all of those sorts of predators that one thinks of when you're thinking about mammals. And so what that means is that as New Zealand drifted off out into the ocean, it was basically a land of birds. And so these birds rapidly evolved into occupying all of the niches that you would normally expect birds and mammals to be in.

Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. Pretty, pretty cool

Scott Solomon: stuff. And now some of these are only found on offshore islands, partially because of what has happened in the last few hundred years. Right. So, so tell us a little bit about, about that part of the story. Like what's going on today? I.

Brent Stephenson: Yeah, so I mean, because of the isolation that we, we discussed when, when people arrived in New Zealand, so the Maori were the first people to arrive about 800 to a thousand years ago.

And so that naivety was really the downfall of many species. Then, of course, Europeans arrived in the 17 hundreds, and they brought with them a whole bunch of their sort of favorite things and, and not so favorite things, so rats and cats and things like that. Pigs were, were brought by the Europeans, and so again, there was this sort of new wave of extinction as these mammals took hold so Maori, when they arrived, not only were were they utilizing these birds as a food source, which one of course would do.

So they brought with them Kiri. They also had a small dog. And so in the time between Maori arrival and present day around something around 50 to 52 species of birds have become extinct. Wow. So a significant proportion of the, a av fauna of New Zealand has unfortunately become extinct since the arrival of humans.

Not only are rats and, and things like the Ellas, the Stoke, weasel and ferret, are they having a direct impact on the birds back in those days and [00:09:00] still to the present day, but things like browsing animals, the deer and and goats and so on. Have a big impact on the flora as well. So all of the plants, they evolved also without these browsing mammals.

Right. Now, some, as I mentioned, you know, some of these species of birds evolved into these niches that were occupied by mammals. And so things like MOA and some of the other birds were brows. But a browsing beak is very different to a browsing set of teeth. So,

Scott Solomon: you know, and, and just to be clear, browsing is that is a form of eating plants where you're basically eating the leaves off of a, a bush or a tree like a deer might do, as opposed to like eating grass off of the ground, right?

Yes,

Sure. Some of the, the keystone species and, and some of these habitats, um, very important invertebrates, which form a lot of ecological roles and food for the birds and, and so on. These have been impacted immensely as well because some of those, uh, have developed flight. Also,

Welcome back. I'm Scott Solomon, and I'm speaking with bird biologist Brent Stevenson about the Remarkable Birds of New Zealand.

I do want to talk about some of those, some of those bird species that that went extinct, because some of them are just truly incredible. So I'm thinking about the MOA in particular. Sure. Maybe you can say a little bit about if, if people aren't familiar with, with what a MOA was like this. Tell us a little bit about it.

Right.

And we're talking 12 to 13 feet tall. So when you're thinking of mower and what does a mower look like? Think ostrich. Yeah. And either stretch it or make it shorter. They were related to the ostriches and the rite birds. So ostriches, emus, rear from, from Southern South America. South America. Yep. Yep. So they were related to them.

The rites also include the kiwi, which again is a, another endemic family within New Zealand. So the kiwi are also rites. And all of these rites don't have a, a breast bone. So the breast bone is where in a flighted bird, all of those muscles to, to move the wings are attached. And so these birds are all flightless and they don't have that breastbone.

I can't honestly imagine standing next to a 12 foot tall moa. That sounds terrifying.

Brent Stephenson: That might've been, I mean, yeah, that, that must've been quite something. Basically, you are looking up at a bird that's twice the height of, you know Yeah. A fairly tall person. Exactly. So they were, however, fairly docile, they were mainly these browsing by habits, so they were eating vegetation.

Obviously they could, they could get it near the top of many of the shrubs and bushes. Yeah. Like a giraffe or something would be doing. Right, exactly. Yeah. Yep. So they were mainly browsing birds, eating vegetation, but as I said, right down to birds that was not much bigger than a chicken. So this range of species really were quite interesting in their diversity.

And then

Right. Like, you know, it

Brent Stephenson: was the same situation as arriving in, in Mauritius and finding the dodo. Exactly. You know? Yeah. Those, those sailors back then saw these food sources and that's exactly, I imagine how the Maori would've, would've seen these birds when they first arrived. So yeah, they were incredibly docile.

You know, many of the New Zealand birds still are, you know, like tahe, large flightless bird that resembles a a swamp pen. They have a completely different habit to the very common ubiquitous swamp pens that are around the, the rest of the world, which will have, you know, clutches of 10 eggs and a nest, and they'll have three or four attempts during the breeding season.

The tahe doesn't do that. It's got a completely different strategy. It has, you know, just a couple of eggs. One or two chicks will survive and they'll do that once a season and they invest a lot of care into that, that youngster and all those youngsters. So everything happens much slower. There's often, in many of the New Zealand species, there's delayed sexual maturity.

Yeah. And producing fewer chicks was something that was undertaken.

Scott Solomon: I mean, I guess basically they could get away with that because there weren't a lot of predators. So like there's no, there's no downside to having that lifestyle if you don't have predators that are there, kind of, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Brent Stephenson: And, and they certainly would still have been predators, but those other predators would've been birds. So Yeah. Different strategies were employed.

Scott Solomon: That's right. 'cause there was also this like amazing eagle, right, that that also became extinct. That, if I'm not mistaken. Prayed on moa, right?

Brent Stephenson: Yes, correct.

Scott Solomon: a harpy eagle chick. The only time I've ever seen one in the wild was a chick in the nest, and it was pointed out to me, and I was like, there's no way that's a chick.

It was the one of the biggest birds I've ever seen. It was sitting in a nest. And they were like, well, you're telling me that's the baby?

Brent Stephenson: Yeah,

Scott Solomon: that's the baby. You, you

Brent Stephenson: don't wanna see mama when she's angry. No,

Scott Solomon: exactly. Um, so these were even bigger than that. That's crazy. These

Brent Stephenson: were even bigger than that.

They were up to probably around 30, 30, almost 35 pounds in weight. They had a a three meter wingspan. So we're talking sort of 11 feet wingspan, and that those two things don't quite marry up because this bird was so huge. And, and, and weight. The wingspan is described as being a little small for a bird of that weight.

And I'm gonna put it back into kilograms just so my brain can work it out. But you, you're talking a 15 kilogram. B bird, eagle taking down a more, which might weigh, you know, 150 kilograms. Yeah. Or more. Wow. So that is a serious predator right there. Yeah. They, their talons were huge. They had huge feat, but the beak was also incredibly powerful.

So, must have been an amazing bird to see. And you mentioned before that standing beside a mower would've been quite frightening and daunting. Yeah. I'd weigh you standing next to a, a half seager would've been even worse.

Scott Solomon: That's, yeah. Or having one hover above you or,

Brent Stephenson: yeah. I mean, heading towards you and they, yeah, exactly.

Were already extinct by the time they No, they were, they were already gone. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But two amazing birds that evolved into these just bizarre sort of ecological roles. Absolutely.

Scott Solomon: Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the amazing species of birds that are, that are still found in New Zealand, and yeah.

That

Brent Stephenson: might be a happier subject. Right.

Brent Stephenson: You'd be looking at a bird that sort of, I guess. It is about chicken size and often people are expecting something smaller, but there, there are five species of kiwi. They're all mostly nocturnal and they're, they range in size from the size of a large chicken down to the size of a, of a Bantam. The, the really defining thing about them though is that.

In my mind, they're actually a mammal with feathers. Whoa. Why do you say that? Because they share more similarities with mammals than they do with most other species of birds. Hmm. They have an acute sense of smell. The only thing that we, the only bird that we know of that has a better sense of smell is, uh, uh, some of the vultures.

Scott Solomon: Mm-hmm.

They're nocturnal, which many mammals are as well. Yeah. They have two working ovaries. I think I'm getting this the right way around. Two working ovaries like mammals rather than most birds just have one working ovary.

Scott Solomon: Hmm.

Brent Stephenson: They're. Their temperature, their internal temperature is more like a mammal than that of a bird, and they have whiskers on around their face.

Many birds do have small bristles or whiskers around their beaks. Yeah. But, but kiwi really have these long whiskers around their bill kind like a cat does and, and many mammals so.

Scott Solomon: And, and just to be clear, when you say whiskers, like, you know, it's not like hair right? But sort of they're Oh, no, they are, they are.

They're,

Brent Stephenson: they're, they're basically a long, like a hair.

Scott Solomon: Yeah.

Brent Stephenson: Hair. Yeah.

Brent Stephenson: yeah. Are quite, yeah. I mean, if you touch a kiwi, it's more like patting fur than it is like feathers. So, wow. They have these sort of feathers which don't have all the interlocking, like bristles or something.

Right. Or like, uh, yeah, they, they don't have all the interlocking mechanisms that keep feathers together for, for flight especially. And of course, the one thing that I did miss there is that not only are these birds nocturnal on all of those other things, but they're flightless, so,

Scott Solomon: yeah.

Brent Stephenson: You know, they run around on the ground at night, they have these stubby tiny little wings, which are barely feathered.

And you, you basically have to uncover the feathers on the body to look at these tiny little wings. Yeah. So. Yeah, they're, they're amazing birds and, and seeing, seeing them in the wild is, is really special. Of course, for many visitors coming to New Zealand, that's one of the key things that they want to see, you know?

Scott Solomon: of the other facts about the kiwi bird that I've read that just seems amazing is that their eggs are incredibly large, right? Like, I think up to like a quarter of the body weight of the, the female is like the, the egg.

Is that, is that right? Like, that's crazy. I can't imagine like, how does that, how does that even work?

Brent Stephenson: Yeah. That, that's an incredible feat for a female kiwi to, to be able to lay an egg that is up to a, around a quarter of the, of her weight. And when you see a picture, an x-ray of a female kiwi with an egg insider.

Yeah. And in most species of kiwi, it's the male that will incubate. So she lays the egg, she says, Hey buddy, I'm done. Time out. I'm gonna go and have a little bit of recreation time. Yes. She's put enough effort into it, clearly. Yes, I think so. And so the males will incubate the eggs. Now there are, one of the species is a little more family oriented and, and.

The whole sort of family will often incubate the egg, but for most of the species, it's the male that, that incubates the eggs. And we're talking a long time, Hmm, about a hundred days for a kiwi egg to fully develop and for the chick to hatch. And the other really quite unusual strategy that they employ is that when the chick hatches, it's basically a mini, a mini kiwi.

Wow. And then it, from that point on, it's on its own. It will go off, out into the forest at night. The male will, will get up and it'll go off out and do its feeding. And the chick will normally be off on its own feeding itself, doing all the things that, that Kiwis need to do to sustain themselves from the get-go.

It, it hasn't, it's not being taught, it's not being fed, it's not doing any of that stuff. It's an independent little youngster Right. From. From, from the start.

Scott Solomon: Yeah. Very different from what I think of as a baby bird where it's sort of naked and help helplessly and, and you know, squawking for food and the parents come and, you know, shove worms in its mouth or whatever they do.

Right. Like that, that's my picture of a baby bird. So these don't do that all, they're like ready to go.

After it hatches, they are still being sort of protected by the adult. They're often being fed by the adult or, or looked after and shown the way, whereas kiwi are, are often and doing their own thing. Pretty amazing.

This is Wild World. I'm Scott Solomon and my guest is Kiwi Ornithologist Brent Stevenson.

And then had Kia damage them. Correct. So, so help us understand that. So, so what, what is a Kia and what the heck are they doing to people's cars?

Brent Stephenson: Well, yeah, they, a Kia is a large parrot with a large bill and so they would, they stand about a foot tall. They're sort of a greeny, greeny brownie color. When you see them close up, they're really quite spectacular birds with the, the feathers having an iridescence to them this beautiful green iridescence.

And when they raise their wings, they have this incredible scarlet sort of orangey underwing. That is a real surprise. You know, when this bird lifts its wings and flies off, people are like, wow, what was that? Yeah. But the bill on these things is very large, think sort of cockatoo sized bird with a, an even probably bigger.

And so you leave your car parked in, in a, a car park, they will come down and their favorite thing to do is to grab hold of the windscreen wipers and chew on the rubber. Oh, they'll, they'll peel the rubber from around the edge of the windscreen. Anything that's a little bit different, they'll look at, and it's fair game.

They don't talk about kiwi, they talk about this bird that just shredded their Right. Their higher cars. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The birds

Scott Solomon: are coming to

Brent Stephenson: them,

Scott Solomon: it sounds like in

Brent Stephenson: this case. Exactly. Yeah. Right. You don't, and you know, they're not overly, there's certainly a bird that has declined quite significantly.

Mm. At one time they had a bounty on them, unfortunately, for, from the government put a bounty on them because they, they were, they do certainly prey on. Carcasses, they'll, the, they, they will eat basically anything. As I mentioned, they're incredibly curious and living in the places they do any source of food Yeah.

I see. I'm, I'm sure in some cases they may well have inflicted wounds, but particularly going for the fat around the kidneys on the back of a sheep. Wow. So, yeah, finding out that there was a, a fat reserve around that location. These birds have have taken advantage of it, certainly amongst dead sheep. So a bounty on them.

Huge numbers. I think the number was something like 60,000 birds were. Killed during the time that there was a bounty on them. Wow. So they're not incredibly common these days, but, but there's no longer a boun, it sounds like. Right? There is no longer a bounty on them. Yeah, no. And if you go to the right places, you've got a good chance of seeing them.

And sometimes you haven't seen them, but you come back and your windscreen wipers are still chewed. So they found you. You didn't see that. That's a real

Scott Solomon: bummer when that happens. Oh man. Wow. Well, there's also the, the kakapo, which is also a parrot, but very different from what I understand,

They're one of the birds that you're talking about. They're only found on one or two little islands. In New Zealand these days, I think the numbers, they're around 240 individual birds these days. Wow. And that's after decades of really, really intensive management of the species by Department of Conservation, which is a, a government organization that does a lot of great work around New Zealand.

They've invested a huge amount because of the uniqueness of, of this bird and, and the very low numbers. And they are, again, almost a, a melding of, of mammal and bird. They're, again, nocturnal. They can, if you really wanna stretch the, the term flight, they can glide. They, they can't really, they don't have powered flight.

It's been a really long and slow sort of path to getting the species to increase. One of the key problems for the species is that it wasn't realized at first that their breeding is really tied to the fruiting of some of our native trees. And so every few years, these native trees, the po, these poto carp trees, for example, the remu, and when they fruit kakapo, you know, get all the signs that it's gonna be a fruiting year and they will then start to breed.

And, and protecting nests, making sure they're on these predator free islands where all of the predators have been removed and it's, it's just birds again, to, to do their thing. So, yeah. Yeah. An amazing bird. Absolutely. Unfortunately, not something that most people are ever going to see because they're only on these few islands where there are no mammals.

There's very, very tight biosecurity and quarantine to, to go out to these places. So it's really difficult to, to get to see these birds, but hopefully one day in the future when the numbers are, are up, and maybe there'll be some birds and places where people can go and visit them. That's the long-term hope.

I, I, I feel.

Brent Stephenson: Yeah. I mean, New Zealand. Has more species of penguin than I think any other country.

We have recorded 16 species and, and of course it depends on how you define those penguin species. There's anywhere from sort of 18 to 20 penguin species around the world and New Zealand's got, can claim that we've had 16 of them set foot within New Zealand at some stage. Wow. Most of those do breed in New Zealand, so many of them down in the sub Antarctic islands, south of New Zealand.

And then the Ross Sea, which is part of the sort of New Zealand dependency in the Antarctic, does have things like a deli, penguins and mm-hmm. Of course the largest emperor penguin. But the penguins around the, the sub Antarctic islands, and especially around the mainland of New Zealand, we have three species that breed within mainland New Zealand.

Scott Solomon: Um, and they're super cute. I mean, the pictures I've seen of them, including in your book Yeah. They, they just look adorable.

Brent Stephenson: Yeah, they are. They, they look like the, the, the sort of classic little penguin that you wanna pick up and give a cuddle. Of course we don't condone cuddling penguins or any other New Zealand birds, but, um, yeah, they're, they're super cute little, little chaps, so a little bit larger than them and found around the southern sort of coast of the South island and around Stewart Island is the field and Crested Penguin and these.

And so the, that part of the south island has this really dense temperate rainforest. Gets a lot of rain there on the west coast. 'cause the prevailing winds are coming across the Tasman sea. So a lot of rain, very dense rainforest. And these penguins come onto the beach and disappear up into the forest.

Can you imagine a penguin breeding in a rainforest? It's, it's kind of different.

Scott Solomon: No, that's not, not most people's picture of, at least not my picture of like, uh, you know, the habitat that you would see a penguin in. Yeah, exactly. I think I'm expecting ice,

Brent Stephenson: you know. Yeah. No, no ice. But the third species that's found on the mainland of New Zealand is yellow wide penguin.

Scott Solomon: In our final segment, we'll hear about how Brent helped rediscover a species that was thought to have been extinct.

So how did you get interested in birds? You grew up in New Zealand, were you, as a kid? Were, did you find the birds in your backyard to be interesting?

Brent Stephenson: I did. Yeah. I mean, I've been interested in birds since I was about six or seven. Hmm. I grew up in, just outside of a, a small city in rural New Zealand. My parents owned a tree nursery and so I grew up in the countryside running around, you know, playing in the mud and riding bikes and watching birds, and I was.

I, I wouldn't call them birders, but they do love, you know, being outdoors and seeing wildlife. Yeah. And so they were incredibly encouraging as well. And so growing up, I just, yeah. Remember increasing my interest in birds, going to. Join sort of local clubs in the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, which is one of the big sort of conservation, bird oriented societies in New Zealand.

And at the time it was called the Ornithological Society of New Zealand. That's a mouthful. Especially when you're about 13 or 14. Yeah. But yeah, now called Birds. Birds New Zealand. I became a member of them and, and really. Yeah. My interest in enjoyment in, in birds and bird watching birding increased from that point on.

So

Brent Stephenson: was about 10 or 11.

Really? Yeah. My, my mom took me to a university about two hours away from where we lived called Massey University. Mm-hmm. And it was on my birthday, it was either my 10th or my 11th. And I met with the head of biology. And, you know, you can imagine he gets, you know, 10 year olds all the time coming into his office and saying, Hey, I wanna study birds.

What do I do, Uhhuh? Yeah. So he was like, well you need to do these subjects at school and then come to Massey University and do a degree in biology and, and uh, do a master's and a PhD. And that's exactly what I did. Um, he was actually one of my PhD supervisors when I was Oh, really? Studying Australasian ISTs.

Did, did he

Scott Solomon: remember meeting you when you were that age?

Yeah. Well,

Scott Solomon: and I bet not many of them ended up actually doing it, right. I mean,

Brent Stephenson: probably not. Yeah. Even fewer. And, and to be honest, you know, halfway through my PhD I was thinking, what on earth am I doing? Oh yeah. I'm, you know, it, it was certainly not something that came easy to me. Writing scientific papers and things like that mm-hmm.

Was always a challenge. I love the field work. Being out, seeing birds. Yeah. Interacting, you know, doing, doing field work was. Immense fun, but sitting down and writing was not so much fun. So it took me a little while to, to finish the PhD and during the time I was doing contract work for Department of Conservation.

We set up our company and so. I knew that, you know, I just needed to get this thesis written. It was probably never gonna have anything published from it, but it was something, it was a goal I'd set when I was, you know, 10 or 11. Yeah. And I needed to get it done and I was gonna move on to hopefully make a living out of guiding and yeah.

And, you know, contract research and things like that. And it worked. Yeah. So, yeah.

Is that right? Do you still hold that record?

Scott Solomon: Yeah.

Brent Stephenson: Maybe I should push it for the next month and see what, what I can get to.

And I got to, I think it was 206 species. Hmm. So when you, when you think, okay, New Zealand 365 to three 70, as we were talking about before. Yeah. And I got 206 in a year without really trying. That was, that was pretty good. Now, at that point I was working on ships, so I'd been to the New Zealand, sub Antarctic islands.

And one of our good friends actually achieved that. About four years ago, he managed to get to 250 species, I think it was. Wow. So yeah, he really. He, he in fact, didn't set out to do a big year at the start of the year. There was another guy, another friend who was, you know, he was announcing it, I'm doing a big year.

Scott Solomon: so, yeah.

That's a, that's a big deal. Yeah, for sure. For surely. Yeah. Well, one of the other things that, that I know that you are sort of known for is, is you actually rediscovered, quote, unquote, a species that was thought to have been extinct. Tell, tell me that story.

Brent Stephenson: Yeah, it's pretty surreal. I mean, I still think about that today and think of all the thin threads that led to, to that rediscovery.

Basically, this was a, a, just after we'd started our company. And it was at a time when going out on boats to see seabirds was just sort of beginning. It was happening in various parts of the world. Australia I'd, I'd already done a, a few boat trips out of Australia and other, other places. And so we started doing these trips on boats to see seabirds around New Zealand.

So I organized a boat trip to go off and, and hopefully see these birds out at sea. And the way you do this is you go out in a boat and you throw bits of fish, some fish oil, and these seabirds, which feed a lot or, or find food sources a lot, using sense of smell will be attracted to that, that scent.

Did a lap sort of around the boat. Couple of little close-ish circuits, never came incredibly co close and then disappeared. Most people on the boat that day saw it. Sav, my, my business partner, I think was the first person. He, he saw it, called it out to everyone else. We saw it. I'd the year before bought a digital camera, and so this was my first digital SLR camera with a, you know, an interchangeable lens.

They should be breeding. They shouldn't be up in sort of Northern New Zealand. So we [00:49:00] thought it was strange. Yeah. But what we thought we'd seen in the field was a, a bird that was black on the, on the upper surface with a white rump and seemed to have some black on the, on the whitish underside, but seemed to have this black stripe.

Anyway, when, when I got home, downloaded the photos, looked at the photos, it was sort of, hang on a minute, this doesn't quite look like a black belied storm. Petrol didn't quite match what we all thought we'd seen in the, in the field. Yeah. And certainly didn't match a black belied storm petrol. Hmm. So we sent the photos around to other sea birders around the world, and we got sort of two main responses.

The, the one response was. I think it's a black belied storm petrol, but I've never seen one quite right. One quite like it.

Scott Solomon: Yeah.

Okay. And the problem is that some white belied, storm petrols have black bellies and some black belied storm petrols have white bellies. Well, that's just not fair. Yeah. Well sometimes birding isn't fair. Anyway, the, luckily, you know, we had these digital photos. If I'd taken those photos on my slide cam, you know, on my film camera.

Yeah. The year before or so, they would've been on slides and I would've probably looked at them and said, it's a spec.

Scott Solomon: Mm-hmm. Who,

Brent Stephenson: who knows what it was. Yeah. But because it was digital, you know, I looked at these photos zoomed in and it, and it didn't match what we thought it should look like. We did get a couple of responses from a few people around the world who were like, Hey, this, this is something else.

Yeah. But he knew birds and he said immediately, Hey, this looks like New Zealand storm petrol. And in fact he, he called it by Ocean eighties Mariani, which is the scientific, or one of the scientific names of this, this bird quickly, you know, had a look through books because, you know, this was back in 2003 looking in books and trying to work out what was ocean eighties mariani, and realized that it was this bird that was known from only three specimens.

That had studied these weird and wonderful specimens. And it was a really confusing species because some people considered that it. These specimens were in fact just aberrant plumage of Wilson Storm petrol or, or, or something else. And so, yeah, whether it was extinct or whether it was a species that wasn't really described or who knows, but in the end, that's, that's what this bird turned out to be.

Yeah. So Alan was, was spot on and he set the ball in sort of motion for us to start looking at how we could adequately prove that what we'd seen was this almost unknown bird.

I mean, that must have been incredible once you realized, you know, what it actually was that you had seen.

Brent Stephenson: Yeah, absolutely. The story from then sort of goes on that we wanted to try and find where these birds were breeding, they're found in New Zealand during the summer, so we theorize that they're probably breeding here.

And so we started searching on islands. There's just a lot of islands in that area. Many of them have now been made predator free for the birds that breed on them. And so searching these islands was kind of like a needle in a haystack. Yeah. And so we came up with the idea of, of trying to capture the birds at sea.

Hmm. And so in the end, that's what we did. I got a National Geographic grant and we managed to, to get some money from that set up trying to catch these birds at sea. And we were able to actually capture, capture some birds at sea and we weren't able to, unfortunately. Still weren't able to find out where they were breeding.

Yeah. And they somehow managed to, you know, small numbers must have. Been on steep cliffs and evaded predation, so, Hmm. Incredible. They hang on.

Scott Solomon: Yeah.

Scott Solomon: Yeah.

Brent Stephenson: They were there breeding on that island less than 50 kilometers from a city of over a million people.

It's just mind blowing to think

Scott Solomon: it It is. Yeah. Yeah. They were right there. Nobody hits and, and they were right there and, and you and, and other people, you know, do pay attention to birds clearly. And, and yet no, you know, no one had had spotted them there. It's incredible. Yeah.

So subsequent to the removal of rats, almost certainly numbers increased. But also, as I said, you know, in 2001 and, and two, when we were doing these boat trips, this was the early days of people going out on boats to look at seabirds. Mm-hmm. There were lots of boats going out into the, this area fishing.

There were boats carrying scientists who would've known. Potentially what these birds were from, you know, from ports out to these islands to do research out there. But they very rarely did they stop and, and look at birds as they went along. So

Scott Solomon: it sounds like were there the whole

Brent Stephenson: time. So,

Scott Solomon: so I mean this, the idea that you, you found that this species that everyone thought had gone extinct, but it, it just barely hang on and is now recovering thanks to all of these efforts mm-hmm.

Brent Stephenson: Yeah. I mean, New Zealand has done a great job in of decimating bird numbers, but it's also on the flip side, done an incredible job of developing technologies that have just been, you know, absolute game changers in bird conservation technologies to remove.

Rodents and, and mammalian pests from islands. Much of that has been developed in New Zealand. Some of the traps and things that we're now using and, and, and those technologies that we're using all over the world now, were developed in New Zealand and even sort of basic things like back in the early days, taking the eggs out of endangered species nests, incubating them, getting them, you know, to a certain point where they're able to look after themselves and releasing them.

So, you know, all of these technologies are meant that. There is hope for most New Zealand species. There are one or two species that we really still do worry about. Yellow Eye Penguin, as I mentioned before, is one of those species that, certainly on the New Zealand mainland, there might come a time in the next five to 10 years where we, we are not seeing them like we were, and we may, you know, lose them all together from the mainland.

All of those sorts of things still haven't allowed the population to expand. We're still looking at about 150 to 180 individuals, which is what the population was, you know, 40, 50 years ago. Mm-hmm. So despite all that effort, put it this way, if they, you know, department of Conservation and the other people that are doing all of this hard work, if they stopped tomorrow, that bird would probably disappear in the next five to 10 years.

These, these Saddleback were moved to all of these other islands, and now there's, you know, a, a really nice, healthy population in a lot of different places, which means, you know, this, this bird is gonna be with us in, in 50 to a hundred years. So there's a lot of success stories and we should, we should think about those.

Scott Solomon: Exactly. And it's encouraging that it can be done. It does take a tremendous effort, is what you're, is what I'm hearing. But, but you know, that effort can, can really pay off to keep these incredible animals, you know, alive and, and let's hope those efforts are successful.

And, you know, a lot of people poo-pooed that. I myself was like, yeah, [01:00:00] mm, May, 2050, no, I'm not sure this is gonna, you know, I don't think we have the technology, but that sort of technology is, is getting better and better. The focused removal of mammalian predators is really an evolving area. And, you know, there are moves afoot to, to try and remove mammalian predators from Stewart Island right now.

And I really think that that will be successful. That will be a showcase for New Zealand. We already have, you know, an area within Wellington City, our capital city that is predator free. Hmm. They've removed all of the rats and, and. And feral cats and things from that area, and it's essentially predator free within our capital city.

Scott Solomon: Well, Brent Stevenson, thank you so much for, for sharing all of this incredible information about the Birds of of New Zealand.

This has been a lot of fun. Thank you. I.

Brent Stephenson: Yeah, it's been an

Scott Solomon: absolute pleasure, Scott. Woo. To learn more about the Amazing Birds of New Zealand, check out the book Birds of New Zealand, a photographic guide, which Brent Stevenson co-authored along with Paul Schofield. If you'd like to visit New Zealand and see its incredible Birds yourself, check out Brent's guiding service RY Bill tours.

That's it for this episode. Join me next time as we explore another part of our wild world.