What would you do if you found two kiwi fighting on your lawn? Grant Faber from Backyard Kiwi heard a male kiwi calling outside his house on Kauri Mt at Whangarei Heads last week.
When he went out to investigate he got a surprise: “There in the middle of the lawn were two kiwi fighting. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! I watched them for a while, getting worried as they stared to get real serious and I thought “these two are out to kill each other”! So I walked towards them with my torch on thinking they would stop and run off. Not so . They totally ignored me and I walked right up to them.
Here they were right under me in bright torch light fighting! The fighting alternated between leg kicks and then going into a huddle with their heads wrapped around each other and trying to bite each other lower rumps. As the photo shows, one had lost a lot of feathers in this area. Eventually, one ran off into the trees at the side of the lawn with the other in hot pursuit”.
But it didn’t stop there. An hour later, Grant went outside again to have a look around with his torch. “I saw the kiwi with missing feathers at the far end of the lawn. I decided to go and get my camera so I turned my torch off and was walking back around to the kitchen door when I heard thumping footsteps coming towards me.
I shone the torch and a kiwi ran right up to within a metre of me! It was the other aggressive kiwi. It was though he was going to have a go at me but the torch put him off and he veered off into the flax and disappeared.”
Grant says he was buzzing for hours afterwards and reflects that “the experience was the result of 12 years of dedicated work by the community as part of the Backyard Kiwi project. We now see kiwi regularly on our property at night but never before fighting!!”
For more stories on kiwi visit www.backyardkiwi.co.nz
