In a world first in seabird translocation a tītī, or Cooks petrel, has successfully been born on mainland New Zealand in over 200 years.
The tītī chick was born on the Maungahururu Range near Napier.
The project started nine years ago when conservation group Poutiri Ao ō Tāne began a relocation programme to reintroduce Tītī to the mainland.
The birds now only nest on offshore sites like Te Hauturu-o-Toi or Little Barrier Island, Aotea or Great Barrier and Stewart Island.
Te Hauturu-o-Toi gifted 352 Tītī for the project.
Department of Conservation seabird specialist Graeme Taylor says he wasn’t sure if the project would work.
"When we first started there was definitely a level of trepidation,” he said.
“This is the first experimental project in the world to shift seabirds well away from the coast up into the mountains and see whether we can change their behaviour from being a coastal bird to a mountain nest bird, which they were in the past," Taylor said.
DOC ranger Thalia Sachtleben says restoring the ecosystem to the land had been a huge driving force of the project.
"They're a marine species so they bring all their marine nutrients onto the land, their poop basically, that's extra fertiliser for the land and the ecosystem just builds. It all helps to restore the land back to what it was," Sachtleben said.
The baby chick will fledge in mid-March and fly tens of thousands of kilometres, spending several years at sea fending for itself.
The team are confident the seabird will return to nest in the Maungahururu Range because it was born on site.
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