Worm-loving rescued kiwi melts hearts online
Some were surprised to see just how well the bird was gobbling up the worms at Whangārei Bird Recovery Centre.
An injured kiwi snacking on some juicy worms has become an online star.
The Whangārei Bird Recovery Centre recently shared a post on Facebook about the female North Island brown kiwi in recovery after she was hit by a car. More than 350 comments have been left on the post and it has been shared about 500 times.
Robert Webb, who founded the centre with his wife Robyn, told Afternoons a lot of people had never seen a kiwi eating worms.
“God, I’ve never dug so many in all my life. With her chopsticks that she eats them with, she knows how to snaffle them off there without any problems whatsoever.”
Kiwi can gobble up about 200-300 worms a day, if they can find them, Webb says.
The bird is not out of the woods yet but she’s starting to walk again. She was found by a couple under a parked car on Friday night at Whangārei Heads.
“She was flopping over, couldn’t stand properly and everything like that.
Find out why a rescued Kiwi has become an internet sensation
“If you get hit in the spine like that, it can create all sorts of issues for you. But I’m very pleased with her progress.”
Webb says he got into “a bit of trouble” over posting about her, but the key message was to make people aware of the “alarming rate” at which the national icon is getting hit by cars.
It is not unusual for kiwi to get run over about once a month in the area, he says.
“To me, putting her out there, where the public can see what’s happening and what has to be done to help a kiwi when they’ve been hit. It’s making people more aware of certain areas in the north up here, where kiwi are quite pronounced, they’re out on the roads at night.”
Kiwi are usually on the side of the road to pick up pebbles which help them digest food, he says. Often, they end up getting hit by the side of a vehicle’s wheel, “which throws them back off the road, into the drains".
“Unless somebody sees them then there’s no hope of recovering them.”
Backyard Kiwi will be organising for a group of schoolchildren to watch her going back into the wild, once she's well again.
The Whangārei Bird Recovery Centre was founded more than 30 years ago, rescuing and treating about 1300 birds every year.
