Authors: Undin, Malin; Hills, Simon;Lockhart, Peter;Castro, Isabel;

One of the key challenges for biodiversity conservation is how to manage species with severely fragmented distributions. Translocations are an important tool in these scenarios to increase the number of individuals, and increasingly to deliberately boost genetic diversity and thus population growth rate, a phenomenon known as genetic rescue. However, uncertainty around such rescue remains. Here I present results from the North Island brown kiwi (Apteryx mantelli) population on Ponui Island. Thanks to a dual origin translocation in 1964, and close monitoring since 2004, we have recently been able to show that 1) this is one of the densest A. mantelli populations within the range, 2) birds from the two source populations interbreed, 3) some birds breed in groups of more than two unrelated individuals, and 4) this population is more genetically diverse than populations with either a single translocation origin, or no translocation history. Together this suggests a high potential for genetic rescue in this national icon; importantly if genetic rescue is possible in a group like kiwi (which are extraordinarily long-lived, show high pair fidelity, and do not fly), this is eluding to a greatly understudied and underutilised potential for genetic rescue in many other threatened taxa.