Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand abstracts

Little spotted kiwi recruitment on Kapiti Island: a response to J.N. Jolly

Rogan Colbourne*

In the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 22(4):321-328,1 published a paper on recruitment and behaviour of juvenile little spotted kiwi on Kapiti Island in which I described a survey made with the help of a trained dog, and argued that the island supports a selfmaintaining population of kiwi. In response, Jolly (1992) claimed that my use of a dog to estimate recruitment was likely to be biassed, and that the island population is in fact declining. Jolly assumed that a dog is more likely to find juveniles than adults, since adults usually used deep underground burrows for their day-time shelters, whereas juveniles used shelters above ground. He also suggested that I had concentrated my catching effort at sites from which 52 kiwi had been removed from the island, thereby recording juveniles colonising vacant territories.

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