Restorative Breeding

Restoration

Our resident pairs of kārearea are falcons that cannot be rehabilitated and released back into the wild. Once paired up and breeding, the breeding team employs various breeding techniques to encourage the successful production of falcon chicks for release.

It is an integral part of the trust.

We are incredibly fortunate to be one of only two organisations in New Zealand permitted by the Department of Conservation to hold and breed our NZ native falcons.

The number of our kārearea residents is ever-changing when you account for our hatches, rescues, releases and, sadly, deaths. We have a relatively stable population of breeding pairs, many of whom would not survive in the wild due to life-threatening injuries or issues.

  • After the female has laid her eggs.
    The pair is left to rear the chicks themselves. Eggs are pulled if the falcon pair are known to be poor parents or if the team decides they want to encourage the pair to lay another clutch of eggs. Encouraging a pair to lay two sets of eggs in a season is known as ‘double clutching’.

  • When the eggs have hatched the chicks are either returned to be raised by the parents, placed under ‘foster’ parents or hand-raised by our expert team. Once the chicks have reached around 25 days old, they are transported to a suitable release site and placed into a release box known as a ‘hack box hotel’.

  • They remain in the hack box hotel for up to two weeks. During this time, they imprint on the area that they can see from the box and come to recognise the area as ‘home’. Once released, the chicks slowly learn to fly and hunt. Without their parents to teach them, this can be a long process and is very nerve-wracking as they spend lots of time on the ground soon after release, making them vulnerable to predators. Eventually, they become independent and disperse to join the wild breeding population.

Release

With less than 8,000 kārearea left in New Zealand, our mission is to restore the population to ensure the future of the New Zealand falcon in Aotearoa

Our captive breeding program has already seen success with 85 young birds being released into the wild.

" We have successfully
raised and released
83 chicks into the wild. 

Dramatically impacting
the kārearea population."

— Holly Turner, Centre Manager