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Breeding is about laying eggs and rearing chicks. Fantails, riroriro and silvereye have several nests, each with three or four chicks a year. They must, to make sure a few chicks grow up, because rats eat their eggs and cats and stoats catch their chicks. Unlike little birds like fantails (which live short lives and have lots of chicks) kiwi, takahe and kakapo live long lives and only lay one or two eggs in a year. But if their few eggs and chicks are eaten, there are no young birds to replace the parent birds, which get older and older and older and finally die. This is happening to the kiwi in New Zealand forests. |