In the thousand or so years since humans discovered the remote islands that make up New Zealand, three quarters of the indigenous bird species have been driven to extinction, and until recently, it looked like the kiwi could follow.
That would be a loss for the environment, but also for national pride; the kiwi, a small flightless bird that nests in burrows, is the national bird and has become something of an improbable national symbol. The country's dollar is named after it, and New Zealand's residents are often labeled "kiwis" by outsiders.
Now, environmentalists are becoming more hopeful that a project started in 1994 will pull the bird back from the brink.
Kiwi numbers have declined rapidly over the past century, as populations struggled with the twin threats of shrinking habitat and expanding legions of new predators.
Hugh Robertson, who runs the Kiwi Recovery Program of New Zealand's Department of Conservation, estimates that there were as many as 5 million kiwis when European settlers arrived in the 1820s and that the population now stands at 75,000.
"It's because of people and introduced predators: ferrets, stoats, weasels, dogs, cats," said Jeremy Maguire, manager of the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve just outside the town of Christchurch. "They are a species in decline, and if it continues at the current rate, they will become extinct."
There are five species of kiwi, a smaller nocturnal relative of New Zealand's extinct moa, and, more distantly, the emu and the ostrich. All kiwi species are listed on the country's endangered species list. But two of them, the Rowi and Haast Tokoeka, are down to less than 300 birds, earning them a place on New Zealand's "nationally critical" list, its most extreme category of endangered species.
The near-absence of mammals in New Zealand until they arrived with white colonizers meant that many bird species evolved into flightless ground-dwellers, leaving them vulnerable to the incursions of predators.
"In our case, the stage was set for a spectacular tragedy," said John McLennan, who has studied the kiwi for 20 years.
McLennan estimates the kiwi's numbers are declining between 2 percent and 5 percent a year, depending on the species.
"Our flightless birds took an incredible hammering," said McLennan, who is a trustee of the nonprofit organization Save the Kiwi.
The birds are insect eaters with an acute sense of smell and, because they are flightless, their feathers resemble hairs more than traditional avian plumage. Their bones are filled with marrow, again more like mammals than birds, which usually have hollow bones.
When humans arrived some 1,000 years ago from other South Pacific islands, they used fire to clear the forests, starting an erosion of the kiwi's habitat that only gathered speed over time.
And when the Europeans arrived, they brought other animals, which pose the greatest threat. Kiwis evolved in a wooded environment where there were few natural predators apart from various eagles.
The adults weigh at least about 997g and can hold their own against many of the smaller predators, but young kiwis have fewer defenses.
Surveys suggest that in the wild, only one in 20 kiwi chicks survives its first year.
McLennan said that the conservation department and other groups aiding the kiwi put out traps and poison to control the predators, but that has proven an expensive and far-from-complete solution.
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