Couple is stunned when kiwi appears in suburban backyard

When Eugene Dementyev heard a knock on the back door, he thought it was a cat and was surprised to discover it was a kiwi.

Dementyev lives in Broadmeadows, a suburb of Wellington, and was watching a movie with his wife when they heard a sound at the door.

“We thought it was a cat, and it looked a bit like a cat. But then we looked closer and it was a kiwi,” he told Morning Report.

“We saw it with the lights off so we turned them on to get a better look and saw it was a kiwi. It was actually quite big, I didn’t expect it to be that big.”

Dementyev said the Kiwi was looking directly at him before turning around.

The bird was in her backyard for several days and found a spot under the stairs where it would sleep during the day before coming out at night.

The kiwi had been released at Terawhiti Station on the south-west coast, as part of the Kiwi Capital project which aims to restore a large-scale wild kiwi population on Wellington’s slopes. The release site is about 10 kilometers from the suburb of Broadmeadows.

He’s not the only Kiwi to have made a surprise visit in recent days. One of the flightless birds entered a sawmill near Whangārei on Monday morning and spent a few hours exploring before looking for a dark spot under a workbench.

Lucas James, a specialist at Rosvall Sawmill in Whareora, said he was still bleary-eyed early this morning and was using the drill in the workshop when he heard a squeaking sound behind him.

“I turned around and there was a big kiwi running in the middle of the workshop. So I called all the guys, we looked around and we panicked. We didn’t know what to do.”

They closed the workshop doors to prevent entry into any machinery and called in some experts for advice, including the local Department of Conservation (DOC) office.

“It took a couple of hours for them to come out, so the first three hours of my Monday morning I was keeping an eye on the kiwi, making sure it didn’t come out and get crushed by anything.”

The bird seemed unfazed by its unusual surroundings, James said.

“To begin with, he was quite curious, he just wandered around a bit. But as more people came in, he got a little stressed, so we left him alone, he ran around a bit and found a dark corner in the workshop and I sat there for a while. couple hours”.

He was surprised that the kiwi was looking for a sawmill and could only assume that it had been chased by a dog and was looking for a place to hide.

“It’s quite a noisy place and there are big forklifts going everywhere. It’s the last place you’d expect to see a Kiwi running around. It was a really cool experience,” James said.