Critically Endangered
Black Stilt
Himantopus novaezelandiae
The black stilt or kakī, is a wading bird found in New Zealand.
Appearance
Black stilts are a medium-sized (220 g) wader with extremely long pink legs, red eyes, distinctively black plumage, and a long slender black bill. Juveniles have a white breast, neck and head, with a black patch around the eyes, and black belly feathers that distinguish them from pied stilts. Black adult plumage appears in their first or second year.
Published measurements include mass about 223.
Range and habitat
Although black stilts currently breed only in braided river systems in the South Island, subfossil bones show that prior to human arrival they were found in habitats as diverse as narrow bush streams in Hawkes Bay, and a wetland lake surrounded by forest in North Canterbury. In the nineteenth century they bred on riverbeds and in wetlands of the central and eastern North Island and most of the South Island except Fiordland. As late as the 1940s they were still common in South Canterbury and Central Otago, and nesting occurred in Central Otago as late as 1964.
Black stilts largely breed in the Mackenzie Basin in the South Island, and are threatened by introduced feral cats, ferrets, and hedgehogs as well as habitat degradation from hydroelectric dams, agriculture, and invasive weeds.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Black stilts breed at 2 (more usually 3) years of age. Both birds collaborate on building a nest in July or August on stable islands or banks in a shingle riverbed. Pairs tend to nest in the same site each year.
In crisis
The population may have numbered 500–1000 birds in the 1940s, but began to rapidly decline in the 1950s, and just 68 adults were counted in 1962. Intensive management began in 1981, when numbers had declined to just 23 adult birds. As of May 2020 the wild population was estimated at 169 wild adult birds.
A captive population of kakī is maintained for breeding and subsequent wild release at a rearing facility in Twizel maintained by the Department of Conservation (DOC), and at the Isaac Conservation and Wildlife Trust in Christchurch. Eggs are collected every year for rearing, from both wild and captive birds. 2021 was the second-best year on record for breeding, with 39 breeding pairs. 175 eggs were collected and 66 left to hatch on nests.
Black Stilt is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Black Stilt, Wikidata item Q686269. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
