Speech By Mac
Tweet tweet, kek kek kek, morepork morepork! Hi my name is Mac and I’m here to tell you why New Zealand birds are special. There are many reasons why the birds of New Zealand are special. 70% are only found in New Zealand like the Kiwi, Takahe, Kea, and Kakapo.
One of the biggest effects on our native birds are pests like possums, stoats, ferrets, rats, feral cats and hedgehogs. Pests have a big impact on NZ native birds because they eat their eggs which causes them not to be born, they eat the birds and they also eat their habitat, because possums eat the tree leaves and kill the trees. If too many pests eat the native birds and their eggs that means they will become more and more closer to being extinct this means there won’t be any in the future to make NZ NZ.
Here are some facts about NZ native birds.
Did you know that 95% of Kiwi chicks die before they are 6 months old and most of them are killed by stoats. There are about 68,000 Kiwi left in the whole world. We hear a lot about the Kiwi being endangered but there are other New Zealand native birds more endangered than Kiwi such as the Black Stilt which has 106 left in the wild, Kakapo which has fewer than 160 left in the wild, and the New Zealand Fairy Tern has only 45 left in the wild and is probably New Zealand’s rarest native bird.
Another threat to our native birds is the loss of places for them to live. Over the years lots of our native birds bush and wetlands have been removed. We need to make sure we look after the land that’s left for our birds.
What can we do to help our native birds in the future?
Have you thought about joining the Pirongia conservation group. They do pest control in an area on Pirongia Mountain and are re-introducing birds that were once there but are not anymore. We need to make sure we keep the pest numbers down so there is nothing to hurt our birds anymore.
