Live broadcast
This May and June, audiences around the world are invited to enter the nocturnal world of Aotearoa New Zealand’s kiwi, a flightless bird active almost entirely after dark.
Ngā Manu Huna is a live, two-night broadcast transmitting the calls of North Island Brown Kiwi from a remote valley in Te Pēwhairangi. The project brings together environmental sound, the Maramataka (Māori lunar calendar), conservation science, and contemporary art, offering a rare real-time encounter with one of the world’s most distinctive and widely recognised endangered birds.
Ngā Manu Huna takes place in the first two hours of darkness during the autumn new moons, aligning with both the Maramataka and Te Papa Atawhai | Department of Conservation’s annual kiwi call monitoring period.
The project is presented at www.ngamanuhuna.nz and will return annually.
A Nocturnal Encounter with the Hidden Bird of Tāne
Known by Māori as “te manu huna a Tāne”—the hidden bird of Tāne—the kiwi is a treasured species living under the protection of Tāne Mahuta, the Māori deity of the forest and its creatures. During autumn nights, male and female kiwi call to each other across distance, their piercing voices echoing through the landscape as they seek partners and maintain territory.
The project takes its name from this unseen presence in the dark. On nights without moonlight, when kiwi are most vocal, the Ngā Manu Huna website becomes “Te tioro a te kiwi”—the cry of the kiwi—carrying live, unedited audio via a portable satellite link from a remote rural location to listeners around the world.
Although the kiwi is an internationally recognised symbol of Aotearoa, many New Zealanders have never heard its call in the wild. Artists Jenny Gillam and Eugene Hansen (Maniapoto) created this project to share that rare experience, an encounter that is at once cultural, scientific, and evocative. As part of their ongoing site-responsive practice, the work explores liveness and non-human agency, contributing to wider discourse around conservation, indigeneity, and relationships with the more-than-human world.
Art and Conservation Science Intersect
Ngā Manu Huna operates at the intersection of deep listening, acoustic ecology, and long-term environmental monitoring.
The North Island Brown Kiwi (Apteryx mantelli) is currently classified as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, facing a high risk of extinction in the wild due to predation by introduced species and habitat loss from land development.
Since the early 1990s, Te Papa Atawhai | Department of Conservation and trained volunteers have conducted nationwide kiwi call counts to track population trends. These records contribute to important long-term datasets on kiwi health.
Ngā Manu Huna broadcasts from the area with the highest known density of North Island Brown Kiwi in Aotearoa New Zealand, a population that continues to grow through sustained predator control and community collaboration.
How to listen
Listeners can access the broadcast at www.ngamanuhuna.nz, where the livestream will run from 6:00–8:00pm NZST. The audio is live and unedited. Quiet stretches, wind noise, sounds of other animals, and occasional livestream buffering may be part of the experience.
Subscribers will receive email reminders and updates regarding weather-related postponements.
Ngā Manu Huna is supported by Toi Rauwhārangi | College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.
