Endangered
Takahē
Porphyrio hochstetteri
The South Island Takahē is a flightless swamphen indigenous to New Zealand and the largest living member of the rail family.
The rail
Published measurements include mass about 2.673.
Range and habitat
The Takahē's preferred habitat is alpine grasslands. The species is still present in the location where it was rediscovered in the Murchison Mountains. Small numbers have also been successfully translocated to five predator-free offshore islands, Tiritiri Matangi, Kapiti, Maud, Mana and Motutapu.
The South Island Takahē is a flightless swamphen indigenous to New Zealand and the largest living member of the rail family. It is often known by the abbreviated name Takahē, that it shares with the recently (14th century) extinct North Island Takahē.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
It builds a bulky nest under bushes and scrub, and lays one to three buff eggs.
In crisis
As of 2023, the population is around 500 and is growing by 8 percent per year. In fact, the Takahē population was at 400 before it was reduced to 118 in 1982 due to competition with Fiordland domestic deer. The Fiordland Takahē population has a successful degree of reproductive output due to these management methods: the number of chicks per pairing with infertile egg removal and captive rearing is 0.66, compared to 0.43 for regions without any breeding management.
One bird was killed in 2009 and four more—equivalent to 5% of the total population—in 2015. One of the original long-term goals was to establish a self-sustaining population of well over 500 South Island Takahē.
Takahē is 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 Takahē, Wikidata item Q212302. 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.
