David Edgar Crockett

David Edgar Crockett

As a child in the 1940s, ‘Crockett spent all his spare time collecting dead seabirds from beaches and boiling their cadavers over a fire in his back garden. “My mother used to put me in one disinfectant bath and my clothes in another,” says Crockett. Within a few years he had collected nearly 240 skeletons of 39 species and was considered knowledgeable enough to work in the museum on several boxes of bird bones that collectors had brought from Chatham Island years before.

From John Dyson’s story on ‘David Crockett and the elusive taiko’, Reader’s Digest, December 1980, p86

The world’s rarest seabird, the Chatham Island taiko, has amateur ornithologist David Crockett to thank for its rescue from almost certain extinction.

Crockett became interested in ornithology in the 1940s. As a Christchurch schoolboy, he was involved in a bird club at the Canterbury Museum. Crockett became familiar with bird bones when museum director and eminent ornithologist Robert Falla encouraged him to patrol the Christchurch beaches for bird skeletons to add to the Museum’s collections.

In 1952, when Crockett was at the Museum sorting Moriori midden material from the Chatham Islands, he discovered bones from 11 petrels that did not match any known species. These bones were eventually linked to a single petrel specimen, the Magenta Petrel, collected east of the Chatham Islands in 1867 and held by a museum in Turin, Italy. Inspired by historical reports of a large petrel, or ‘taiko’ breeding ground in the south-west Chatham Islands, Crockett decided to search for the mysterious bird.

By now, Crockett was a trained teacher, working as a school science adviser in Wanganui. In 1969, Crockett embarked on a search for the taiko on the southern coast of Chatham Island. The search was unsuccessful, but in the summer of 1972/73, Crockett, now based in Whangarei, and a group of volunteers (including his wife, Ruth) went back to the Chatham Islands where they saw what they believed to be four taiko – the first sighting of the bird for more than a century. Few people believed in their ‘discovery’, but Crockett and his team persevered, continuing with annual expeditions to the Chatham Islands.

They were rewarded in 1978, when, after an all-night vigil, two birds were attracted to the ground with lights, caught, and confirmed as both the Chatham Island taiko and the Magenta Petrel. The next step was to find the breeding grounds. With assistance from Department of Conservation staff, who attached tiny radio transmitters to taikos’ tail feathers, the breeding burrows were discovered in the Tuku Valley in 1987. The next year, the Department of& Conservation began trapping predators (cats, possums and rats) in the breeding area. Recently, the Chatham Island Taiko Trust constructed a 700-metre predator-proof fence on land donated by the Tuanui family to create a secure breeding site for the taiko.

Today, the taiko is still considered critically endangered, with a total population of 120-150 birds, and only 14 known nesting burrows.

By Rebecca Priestley

Medals and awards

Science & Technology Medal 1996, QSO 2000

Further reading

The Chatham Island Taiko Trust website

Chatham Island Taito Information - NZBirds.com website

Gerard Hutching, Back from the Brink: the fight to save our endangered birds, Penguin Books, 2004

Image courtesy David Crockett

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