Makarora Mohua

The clear, melodic song of mohua once echoed throughout South Island beech forests. Today, fewer than 5,000 remain throughout the country, making them one of Aotearoa’s most threatened forest birds.

The Makarora Valley is home to one of the remaining mainland populations. Here, Southern Lakes Sanctuary, the Central Otago Lakes Branch of Forest & Bird, DOC, volunteers and funding partners are proving that with sustained predator control, science and innovation, mohua can recover.

By the numbers

Our latest results for mohua conservation in Makarora.

Mohua are responding

For three consecutive breeding seasons, the Makarora population has shown encouraging signs of recovery.

Monitoring during the 2025/26 season recorded an increase from six to eight territorial pairs, with continued successful breeding across the managed area. Since intensive monitoring began, more than 55 fledglings have been produced, providing growing evidence that sustained predator control is helping reverse declines.

Every breeding season builds resilience into what remains a small and vulnerable population, demonstrating that long-term protection can deliver measurable conservation outcomes.

Tech meets manu: tracking mohua by song

For the past four years, Southern Lakes Sanctuary has partnered with Digilab to pioneer a new approach to monitoring mohua.

Here’s how it works:

Acoustic recorders are placed in mohua territories, particularly where we have banded birds
Digilab turns the birdsong into spectrograms — visual representations of sound
Using advanced AI (a Vision Transformer model — think ChatGPT for birdsong!), they’re developing tools to identify individual mohua by their unique calls

Instead of manually listening to thousands of hours of recordings, artificial intelligence analyses audio collected throughout the valley, identifying mohua calls alongside the wider forest bird community.

During the latest monitoring period, 12 autonomous recorders captured nearly 1,500 hours of forest sound. AI detected more than 249,000 bird vocalisations, including over 20,000 mohua calls.

This technology allows us to understand not only where mohua are present, but how breeding activity, seasonal behaviour and the wider bird community respond to predator control across the landscape.

Innovation like this is helping make conservation more effective, scalable and evidence-based.

A legacy of care

Mohua conservation in Makarora didn’t begin yesterday. Central Otago Lakes Branch of Forest & Bird volunteers have been active here since 1998, with annual mohua monitoring starting in 2011. Since 2021, Southern Lakes Sanctuary has stepped in to expand and support this critical work in one of our most important management zones.

We’re proud to be building on this legacy — and grateful to all our partners and funders helping make it possible.

Thank you to Otago Regional Council’s EcoFund, DOC Community Fund and Les Hutchins Conservation Foundation for your support of this essential mahi.

The next chapter

Despite these promising results, mohua remain in serious trouble.

The population in Makarora is small, fragile and surrounded by predator-prone habitat. One bad season, one rat plague, one lapse in control — and everything we’ve gained could be lost.

To secure the future of mohua, we need to keep expanding, keep innovating and keep the pressure on.