Moriori mutton-birding practices were described in detail by Skinner & Baucke (1928).  The highly organized and ritualized, annual process matched events recorded by other authors.  The Tchaik fledglings (Moriori name for Taiko) were collected in a cruel way with a lingering death which missionaries modified to a more humane method.  Conservation of the burrows was of prime importance to the way the fledglings were collected.  Although large numbers of fledglings were collected  annually for food by the Moriori (Skinner & Baucke 1928), and later by the Maori inhabitants of the Chathams, the species was still common by the time of European discovery.

    However with the discovery of the Chatham Islands by W.R.Broughton of HMS Chatham in 1791, the Islands soon became an important centre for whaling and sealing ships.  Cattle, pigs, and sheep were introduced and soon became feral.  Cats and two species of rats (Rattus norvegicus and R. rattus) also arrived with the Europeans, (the Polynesian rat R. exulans) arrived with the Moriori. Within 100 years of these mammals being introduced to the Chatham Island the Taiko would virtually be gone.  The annual mutton-birding trips to the Taiko breeding grounds ceased in the first years of the Twentieth century as the birds became harder to find, with the last recorded trip being in 1903 when 300 birds were collected

   In 1939 Charles Fleming's paper on the results of his trip to the Chatham Islands, (28 November 1937 till 24 January 1938), was published in three parts in Emu .  The expedition gained valuable information on the wide variety of birdlife there, both on the abundance and diversity of seabirds as well as the bush birds, including the discovery of small populations of Black robins and Forbes parakeets, both of which had been considered extinct at the time.
   Fleming included in his work the observations of the local islanders, so preserving valuable information that otherwise would have been lost. Some of these accounts refereed to a petrel known as 'Taiko'.

    The story of the rediscovery of the Taiko begins back in the 1940's when David Crockett as a schoolboy, (the man who eventually rediscovered the Taiko) was involved with a bird club at the Canterbury Museum organized by the late Sir Robert Falla.  He had become familiar with bird bones when Falla had him patrolling beaches to collect bird skeletons.
    In 1952 he sorted Moriori midden material collected from the Chatham Islands.  Among the remains of these former feasts he came across many petrel bones that did not fit any known specimens.  These bones were eventually linked to a single petrel specimen held by the Turin Museum in Italy.  Labelled "Magenta Petrel", it had been collected in 1867 by the crew of the Italian research ship Magenta, 800 kilometres east of the Chatham Islands.  In 1958 Dr William Bourne, of Aberdeen University, had chanced across the specimen in an attic of Turin Museum.  Dr Bourne began to correspond with David Crockett and in 1964 suggested that the bones he had discovered from the Chatham Islands may be that of the Magenta Petrel.

    David Crockett tells of reports early in the 20th Century from Chatham Islanders of a large petrel  breeding in the south-west.  It had been collected by the Morioris and Maoris as a muttonbird until 1908.  In 1969 David Crockett and a group of volunteers began to search for the Taiko on the southern coast of the Chatham Island.
    Four years later in 1973, they saw four of what they thought were Taiko after attracting them towards bright lights.  That idea came from early whalers' accounts of the birds flying into tripot fires.  "Suddenly two fast flying birds appeared around the light for about 20 minutes", says David.  He and three companions were amazed by the aerial performance of these "dark bodied, white breasted petrels that looked headless in the light".

    The rediscovery was not widely believed.  Several more expeditions followed, but it was not until New Years Day 1978 that the first two birds were caught and confirmed as both the Chatham Island Taiko and the Magenta Petrel.  The birds were attracted to the ground with lights and then captured enabling the searchers to finally put to rest any further doubts as to the birds existence.
 

David Crockett with the first two Chatham Island Taiko captured on New Years Day 1978

Photograph   Russell Thomas

           If the task of proving the Taiko's existence took nine years and seven expeditions to the Chathams, then finding the breeding grounds of the birds proved an even more daunting prospect.  Somewhere in the Southwest corner of the Chatham were the burrows.  It took a further 10 years to find the first of these.   Eventually in the spring of 1987 the first of these were located near a tributary of the Tuku-a-Tamatea  river.

          Late in 1982 after satisfactory trials with the related Grey-faced Petrel, Dr Mike Imber of the New Zealand Wildlife Service, began attaching small radio transmitters to the tail feathers of Taiko in an effort to track them to their nesting burrows.  Three birds were caught and had the transmitters attached, however no useful signals were picked up.  A similar trial in 1985 was equally disappointing.

        In October 1987, a major expedition set out for the Chathams - 24 members of David Crockett's Taiko Expedition, 16 D.O.C (Department of Conservation) assisted volunteers and 6 D.O.C. staff members.  The team captured 12 Taiko and attached radio transmitters to  10 of them, placing the tiny transmitters to the central tail feathers so that the birds would lose them during their annual moult.  Five tracking stations tracked the birds after they were released.  Two of the birds flew inland to the bush clad valleys and went to ground in burrows more than 4 kilometres apart.  Staff were then able to pin point their location with the aid of aerial photographs.  Night long vigils at the entrances of one of these burrows confirmed that Taiko were resident.

        These telemetry expeditions now take place every two years and to date seven separate locations of burrows have been found.  The latest expedition ( October - November 1999) proving to be the most successful yet with three new areas containing burrows being discovered.  The vast majority of these being "prospecting" burrows, where young male birds are digging out a burrow for the first time, but not breeding.  However within two of these new areas were 4 burrows containing breeding pairs,  This was an exciting discovery as it now brought the number of known breeding burrows to six.  The previous two seasons only two breeding pairs were known of.

        As from the finish of the 1999/2000  breeding season, 98 Chatham Island Taiko have now been caught and banded in the last 30 years.  Population estimates now place the Taiko numbers around 120 birds.  The New Zealand Government's Department of Conservation and the Chatham Island Taiko Trust, (formally the Taiko Expedition) are working together on extensive ongoing programs to ensure the Taikos survival.

        See the Today page for details on the work currently being undertaken.