Robins get fighting chance

In the second week of April, 25 South Island robins from Douglas fir plantations on the flanks of the Silverpeaks were liberated at the Orokonui Ecosanctuary - another milestone for the project, as Neville Peat reports.

Released from its cardboard overnight accommodation - dinner, bed and breakfast - the South Island robin is gone in a heartbeat, a dark flash through the forest understorey.

Orokonui Ecosanctuary's conservation manager, Elton Smith, is impressed.

"That's pretty quick for a fat tum," he says, poking about inside the box.

"I reckon this one's eaten 50 mealworms since yesterday."

The young male robin/toutouwai was among 25 released this month at the 307ha predator-fenced sanctuary near Waitati as part of a multispecies programme of transfers aiming to restore Orokonui Valley to something like its natural state.

Robins and numerous other birds, now threatened, would have inhabited the valley in the 19th century.

Since the erection of the 8.7km fence in 2007, Orokonui's managers have been arranging the reintroduction of an array of species.

Kaka, the forest parrot, and tieke/South Island saddleback were liberated last year, along with jewelled geckos from Otago Peninsula.

Robins were next on the translocation list, and they will be followed this spring by several breeding pairs of kiwi from the Haast area - the most endangered of the six varieties.

For the moment, though, the Silverpeaks robins are in the spotlight.

Their transfer, two years in the planning, has the blessing of the Department of Conservation and the Karitane runaka, Kati Huirapa ki Puketeraki, and if the birds establish at Orokonui they will become a hit with visitors.

When it comes to interacting with people, robins are New Zealand's most confiding birds - not so much tame as inquisitive, keen to investigate what insects and other invertebrate food human visitors have scuffed up in their territory.

But will the transferred robins stay in their new home?

They are free to fly back to their former home in City Forests Ltd's stands of mature Douglas fir, assuming they don't mind crossing four lanes of State Highway 1.

From above the canopy at Orokonui they will be able to see their old plantations.

What they won't know is that these trees are due to be logged in the next few years.

Otago University Associate Professor of Zoology Dr Ian Jamieson, who co-ordinated the transfer, says the Orokonui robins include a range of ages and some pairs.