West Coast Wildlife Centre

The West Coast Wildlife Centre is a kiwi house that opened in 2010 at Franz Josef, which now undertakes the entire Operation Nest Egg incubation for Okarito brown kiwi (aka rowi). The ONE programme takes eggs from the wild, incubates and rears the chicks in a captive situation, and then the young birds are released, the aim of the programme being reducing mortality of chicks from introduced mammalian predators.

The centre is basically composed of four small display rooms, three of which are relating to kiwi (one of them is the nocturnal kiwi house itself, in which there is a restriction on photography so no photos will be posted here), and the fourth being the glacier room. There is also the incubation room for eggs but that was not in operation when I visited due to it being winter.

Pictured here is a taxidermy specimen of a weka (Gallirallus australis), an endemic flightless rail which a lot of tourists to NZ mistake for a kiwi.