Overview
The Chatham Island taiko is one of the world's rarest seabirds. Formerly breeding in hundreds of thousands, if not millions on Chatham Island, taiko were an important food item for Moriori. Nearly fully-grown young were collected from burrows in dense forest in April -May, the same time of year that the chicks of sooty shearwaters are still collected as muttonbirds near Stewart Island. Like all petrels, taiko lay only a single egg each year, and so are very susceptible to predators taking the egg or chick. The adults are also vulnerable to cat predation when they visit their breeding grounds, but have very high survival rates during the nonbreeding season, when they stay out at sea in the South Pacific.
Predation by rats and cats led to the taiko becoming very rare by the early 1900s. Although local people were aware of their existence until at least the 1950s, the identity of the taiko remained a mystery to science until the 1970s.
A single petrel shot in 1868 in the South Pacific from the Italian research vessel Magenta was given the name Aestrelata magentae (now Pterodroma magentae). The specimen remains in the Turin Regional Natural Science Museum in Italy. In 1964 Bill Bourne (a British ornithologist) suggested that the Magenta petrel could be the same as the mysterious taiko. This was confirmed in 1978, when the first two taiko were caught at night in south-west Chatham Island. It took another nine years for the first active nesting burrows to be found. Radio-telemetry was used to aid location of the first two nests in 1987-88, and is still used along with specially-trained dogs to find further burrows. About 17 breeding burrows are known, with about 13 chicks fledging each year from 2008-2010.
Te Papa holds two intact Chatham Island taiko specimens: an adult male apparently killed in a fight with another taiko in November 1996, and a juvenile that died just before it fledged in May 2001. Apart from the original specimen in Turin, the only other taiko specimen (mounted bird or study skin) known to exist is one discovered in Canterbury Museum in 2008. This bird from the 'Pacific Ocean' had been identified and catalogued as a Tahiti petrel, and had been in the Canterbury Museum collection since at least 1910.
Te Papa also holds seven Chatham Island taiko eggs; no other taiko eggs are known to be held by museums elsewhere.