Dr Anna Santure
Associate Professor
Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour Group
School of Biological Sciences Te Kura Mātauranga Koiora
Thomas Building (110), Room 146
University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau
postal address:
School of Biological Sciences Te Kura Mātauranga Koiora
University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau
Private Bag 92019
Auckland Mail Centre
Auckland 1142 Tāmaki Makaurau
New Zealand Aotearoa
Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 83801
a.santure at auckland.ac.nz
Santure group 
Hello Anna
I’ve just read about your work on hihi hatching failure in Birds N Z. and wonder if you’re looking at the available diet of the adult birds. In their natural habitats hihi will have access to certain choice foods. Translocated birds may not have such a choice.
Kia ora Gillian, thanks so much for contacting me. It is an excellent question regarding food availability and choice. The only natural (unmanaged) population of hihi is the Te Hauturu-o Toi / Little Barrier Island population, and monitoring of that wild population is very challenging, so we unfortunately don’t have any information on food preference and range in a natural environment. However, recent work from PhD student Caitlin Andrews (a UK student who visited NZ to do field work here) did illustrate that hihi differ in their diet choices in the managed sanctuary of Tiritiri Matangi, and showed a small to moderate effect of diet specialisation on adult survival (manuscript available at https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.3255; see the section on ‘utility’ in the methods and results). So, interestingly, individual hihi that eat a more diverse range of food survive better. I could imagine that this could have an impact on overall body condition and would be particularly important for females preparing to lay eggs, and may contribute to some of the early egg failures if there are not enough / the right resources allocated to the egg. Caitlin’s diet study is now finished, and requires very time-intensive fieldwork, so may not be repeated in the near future, but we could certainly match up her diet study with the reproduction of those birds that she did study. A very interesting idea, thanks!