This is a young Okarito kiwi looking for some food

I recently had a request to write about kiwis, so today I would like to write about the Okarito kiwi.

Here are five interesting facts about them:

1. Also known as rowis, these cute little birds grow to about 40 cm long.  They can live for a very long time and some have lived for 100 years.
2. Like other species of kiwis, they have lost the ability to fly.  They have very small, weak wings and no longer have the flight muscles attached to their breastbone that flying birds have.
3. They are nocturnal and their long bill has nostrils on the end and they use it to catch and eat worms and insect larvae.
4. At breeding time, Okarito kiwis lay a single egg in a burrow or a hollow log.  Both the male and female help to incubate the egg.
5. Okarito kiwis used to be seen as a subspecies of the North Island brown kiwi, but now are seen as a separate species.  They are restricted to the Okarito forest in New Zealand that’s only about 10 square kilometres. They have also been introduced to a few small islands to help their numbers recover.  There are only a few hundred left in the wild due, mainly due to being eaten by introduced stoats and dogs.

I hope that you found these facts interesting and learned something new.

Are there any other interesting facts that you would like to share about Okarito kiwis?