It's 8.30 in the morning and James Fraser and his hard-working conservation dog, Jo Peag and Jook, are gearing up for a big day. Hello, Peagie, how are you? This is Peag. She's seven years old and she's an English setter. Today, that carrying out important Kiwi survey work in the pest-free Rotter-Cardi Cinec Reserve in Taranaki. And we actually got two dogs in here. This is Strucch. He's four and he's Peag's son. Let's go to work. We're wearing our muzzles and our hivers jackets and the orange helps us to see the dogs and the bush. Even though conservation dogs and their handlers go through extensive training and assessment to become certified, conservation dogs always wear muzzles when working in the presence of protected species. So there are trap lines all through this bush, which is really handy because it's really thick bush. And it gives us an idea of where to go. These guys are a really good company and it's just as well because we spend up to three weeks at a time camping in the bush. So they're living with us. So our job today is to look for a brown Kiwi that live within the stent's area and see what the numbers are and what the condition or the health of these birds is. So Rota Cari is co-hunger sight. That means birds are gathered from outside the fence where the at-risk will be eaten by some of the predators and they're brought into the reserve where they can breed up. And then when the population is big enough and strong enough, they can get returned back out to the area outside of the fence. This is us. This is the start of the trap line. So it's where we start working for the day. So what we're going to do is to take one of the dogs off the lead and that dog will work ahead until it gets bit tired, probably peck, because she's older. And then we'll bring her on hill and let Drew care her own around. Drew, hill, peck, wake up. So I've got two main coolers I'll be using today. And what that means is the dog has to come and look at me and check in and then off it will go again and start searching again. Drew go away. Which has come, so come right into me and stay with me until I tell you to go off again. Drew! So if a dog doesn't come to the come call, it means that it's found a kiwi. And what it means ends with the dog find a white dog and an orange jacket rather than a small brown bird underground. Peck, peck. So I've got peck out there searching now. So she's an indicator dog, so when she finds a bird, she'll stop and point at the bird. She'll point, she'll sit down and that stage I'll go and try to find her. And I'll put her on a lead and have a look down the hole. And if it's a kiwi, we will really gently extract it out of its burrow. What I'll do is I'll get my torch out and have a look. I can't see any bird and it might be a peck door, so what I'll do is I'll give Tasha a ring. And she'll come and give us a hand to block up any peck doors that might be around. James calls for assistance from his coworker Tasha, who was on the other side of the reserve. You ready? One leak? Oh, yeah. And I can't wait that way to get it. So this is great. So I've a bill of 55.1 And I'll wait at 6.5 grams. This will be a check from last season. It's us about 6 months, 9 months old. So what I'm trying to do here is find a little fearless trait. It's an area of no fear that's just under the wing. So we actually put the transporter in there. So now each free time it's bird's court, we can use this transporter reader and find out herders. And now my little friend, we can let you go. We'll be back to sleep for the rest of the day. Outside of fence areas like this, or outside of areas with 95% of chicks get killed by predators. It's only when they get to 12 hundred grams, so one year old, that they're actually safe from those predators. And once they're at that safe weight, they're amazingly capable of growing new populations. And that's what he's going to do when he gets 12 hundred grams. And we release him out of the fence. Good work. We've got to find another one. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Good girl. Pretty cool, eh? Yeah. Where was it? There we go. What's that number say? 56. 56. 50. Oh, 6. We can tell it's an adult female by the length of its bill. If the bill was longer than 105, we know it's an adult female. And this one's 127.7, so she's a huge girl. So what I've got here is a little radio transmitter. And we're going to put this onto the bird's leg. And we'll let it go. The people here can monitor it. And when they think they've found a good place for it to go, they can find a using the radio transmitter and release it back into the teranaki. I feel blown away by the opportunity to work with such dedicated people. James Pagan-Juke are essential to what we do. They're helping us understand the population of Kiwi here and working closely with them helps us learn how to do our work better. I really, really enjoy this work because I get the opportunity to work my dogs and I get the opportunity to work my dogs on these really precious times of species like Kiwi and Cacable. But for me, what makes this really special is being able to work with community groups and volunteers that give up their time to help safeguard those times of species. I really enjoy working with these guys because they do it all for love. Like they follow us, they work hard for us. And they'll go to the end of the world for us. That's a really, really reward part of my job.