Black Robin
The bird that came back from five
Step into the forest
Imagine standing at the edge of a small island forest, far out in the Pacific. Out past the trees, the wind never really stops. It comes in off a cold grey sea and roars through the scrub. Step under the canopy, though, and the noise falls away. Light arrives green and broken through the leaves. The air smells of damp earth and moss, and somewhere close by, something small is watching you.
It’s a robin, round as a pebble and black from beak to tail. It sits on a low branch just above the leaf litter, head tucked down into its shoulders, one bright eye fixed on the ground below. Then it drops. There’s a flick of its bill, a scatter of dead leaves, a quick snatch, and it’s back on its perch with something wriggling. It looks at you again, quite unbothered, as if you were simply another part of the forest.
A few metres away, another robin answers with a handful of clear notes, not elaborate, just enough. The wind carries on outside. In here, the small, steady business of being a black robin goes on as it has for a very long time.
Meet the karure
The black robin, also known as karure and kakaruia, is found nowhere else on Earth but the Chatham Islands. It is a small songbird, about 15 centimetres long, and both males and females are black all over. It is quiet and confiding, almost always busy in the lower layers of the forest. It often holds its large head hunched close to its body, which makes it look short and wonderfully round.
This is a bird of the deep forest. Black robins live, feed and raise their young almost entirely beneath the trees, favouring unbroken forest with a closed canopy and dense, sheltering edges. They are reluctant to venture beyond them. They eat only invertebrates, from spiders, beetles and moths to caterpillars, worms and wētā, usually dropping onto prey from a low branch or flicking over the leaf litter with their bills. Nests are tucked into tree hollows or thick tangles of vine, usually within a couple of metres of the ground. Pairs are faithful to one another and may stay together for life.
The male’s song is short and clear, usually just four or five notes. It isn’t the richest song in the forest, but it carries.
Five birds one pair
By 1900, rats and cats brought by people had wiped black robins out everywhere except tiny Little Mangere Island. Their numbers kept falling. By 1976, the last seven survivors were moved to nearby Mangere Island, where many thousands of trees had been planted to give them shelter.
By 1980, only five black robins were left in the world. Among those five was just one breeding pair: a female known as Old Blue and a male known as Old Yellow. Every hope for the species rested on them.
What followed was careful, patient work on remote, windswept islands. New Zealand Wildlife Service staff, working with the Chathams community, took a bold step called cross-fostering. They moved black robin eggs and young into the nests of Chatham Island tomtits, a close relative, which raised them as their own. That way the robins could produce more young than they could ever have raised alone. Nest by nest and season by season, the numbers began to climb. The approach became a model for saving endangered birds around the world.
Old Blue lived to about 14, among the longest-lived robins known. Every black robin alive today descends from her.
Still a little battler
Today the black robin numbers a few hundred birds, living on two pest-free island reserves, Mangere and Rangatira. That is an extraordinary recovery, but the species remains Nationally Critical. Because every bird is so closely related, they share the same genetic strengths and weaknesses, and a single disease could be devastating. The best territories on both islands are nearly full, and a third population on another island is needed for the species to keep growing.
On 21 September 2026, Forest & Bird announced karure black robin as the public-vote winner of Bird of the Year 2026. Forest & Bird described it as a little battler from Rēkohu / Chatham Islands.
Why this story stays with us
The heart of it, for us, is that moment in 1980. Five birds were left on Earth, and only one breeding pair remained: Old Blue and Old Yellow. The future of a whole species rested on that one pair. It was rescued not by one grand gesture but by people willing to do the slow, careful work, season after season. Today every black robin carries Old Blue’s legacy.
What we love most is the scale of it. The black robin isn’t flamboyant. Its song is a few clear notes, and it lives its whole life in the shade of a forest few people will ever see. Yet its survival is one of the most remarkable turnarounds in the story of New Zealand’s birds. It’s a reminder that small things, held onto carefully, can come back.
The artwork held in ferns and light
A small, round-bodied bird sits facing left on a branch that runs diagonally through the lower half of the coaster. Its head is in profile, with a short, fine bill and a bright eye lifted by a single point of light. The wing is drawn in fine, layered lines, feather over feather. A long tail sweeps down to the right, balancing the slant of the branch.
Ferns do almost all the framing. Fronds arch in from the top corners and both sides. More rise from the foreground in paler relief, their leaflets crisp and regular, so the bird seems held within a living shelter of green. Behind its head, the background softens into a pool of light, as if the canopy had opened just above it.
The composition is quiet in the best way. That light draws your eye straight to the bird’s face and its alert, bright eye. The ferns, layered from pale foreground to deeper shadow, give the coaster a surprising sense of depth, like looking into a forest from a little way off. The rounded silhouette, head settled into the shoulders, echoes the way black robins hold themselves.
The engraving speaks in tone rather than colour. A real black robin is black all over; here, the bird becomes a study in form, texture and light.
In slate and in wood
On slate, the scene is rendered in cool greys within a natural, chipped edge, and the glow behind the bird reads like soft forest light on a grey day. On wood, the same scene turns warm and amber, with rounded corners, and the ferns take on a golden glow. It’s the same bird and the same forest, in two different moods.