Xenicus Peak

This imposing beast is Xenicus Peak in the Cobb Valley. Xenicus is a genus of very small birds, containing only two species. The first is the New Zealand rock wren (Xenicus gilviventris), which is now extremely rare. It occurs in a lot of different parts of the South Island, but there aren’t very many of them. In 2008, the Department of Conservation started transferring rock wrens to a rodent-free island in Fiordland, where they have been able to breed. The second Xenicus species is (was) the bush wren (Xenicus longipes), which was common throughout the country when Europeans first arrived. Rats took a toll on the population, but it was stoats, introduced in 1884 to control rabbits, that really pushed them to the point of extinction. Bush wrens were last sighted in the South Island in 1968, in Nelson Lakes National Park. The Stewart Island subspecies was doing okay until the 1950s, when feral cats started penetrating the island’s more remote parts. In the early 1970s, six birds from the Stewart Island subspecies were moved to Kaimohu Island, which is part of the Snares group southeast of Stewart Island. They didn’t survive, and the species has been regarded as extinct since 1972.