Al Bramley

Alastair has a background in outdoor education and engineering. He first volunteered to help the Department of Conservation staff to recover kiwi eggs in the Kaweka Forest Park in around 2000. Surprised at the critical state of kiwi locally, he encouraged ECOED Trustees to initiate the “Save Our Kiwi Hawke’s Bay” project.

Inventor of new technology for kiwi

It wasn’t long before Alastair teamed up with another local engineer, John Wilks, to put their skills to work and develop a revolutionary transmitter for monitoring kiwi. Called the ‘Chick Timer’, it detects when kiwi are incubating an egg and hatching a chick. This helps kiwi workers identify the best time to intervene and remove either the egg or chick as part of Operation Nest Egg. This saves lots of time, especially if managing remote kiwi nests, and has enabled the ‘Save Our Kiwi Hawke’s Bay’ project to expand.

With an increasing number of remote-living wild kiwi in the Kaweka Range to manage, Alastair and John took to the air in a small plane and developed an automated monitoring system called ‘Sky Ranger’. It now keeps an eye on more than 40 kiwi spread over 25,000 hectares for a fraction of the cost of ground-based monitoring.

Why kiwi?

Alastair says that while kiwi are a flagship species and warrant conservation in their own right, they provide a unique opportunity to engage with the community and work towards wider ecosystem restoration.

Thought for the future

"While our current intensive management provides a short-term injection of young kiwi into the Kaweka Forest Park, the long-term solution relies on the ability to control pests over large areas,” he says. “This will not only benefit kiwi, but provide protection for other species in the ecosystem."