Two oversized metal kakī stand in Twizel’s town centre, celebrating one of New Zealand’s rarest native birds with striking three-metre-plus silhouettes.
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Site-level location · 44.2570° S, 170.0984° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
When Noel Gregg was commissioned to forge two three-metre kakī for Twizel, there were barely more of the birds alive than there were years in his career.
The kakī, or black stilt, is a wading bird found only in the braided rivers of the Mackenzie Basin, and it has been called the world's most endangered wading bird. Five years before the sculptures were made, the adult population was down to thirty-one. Thirty-one birds, in the whole world, in the country immediately around Twizel.
The Department of Conservation's captive breeding programme has since released more than a hundred birds into predator-cleared wetlands, and the sculptures were commissioned in part to raise the profile of an animal whose recovery was starting to work.
Gregg was nearing retirement when he took the job, and he is described as one of the last of a breed – a blacksmith working metal in a way that has changed very little in a thousand years or more. Forging a three-metre bird by hand, in an age of laser cutting and CAD, is an increasingly rare thing, and the technique suits the subject: kakī are long, black, spindly and angular, exactly what hot metal wants to become.
The two birds stand in Twizel's marketplace, confirmed still in place by a Timaru District Libraries record in 2024.
A town monument to a bird that nearly disappeared, made by a craftsman practising a trade that nearly has.
There is a quiet symmetry in the pairing. A species pulled back from thirty-one individuals, and a trade practised by a shrinking handful of people, preserved together in the same two objects on a Mackenzie Basin street.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Two oversized metal kakī (black stilt) sculptures stand in Twizel's town marketplace, each more than three metres tall. They celebrate one of New Zealand's rarest native birds through striking silhouette forms and remain a distinctive fixture of the town centre.
ACCESS
The Kakī / Black Stilt sculptures are in pedestrian-only Twizel Market Place. Mackenzie District Council currently confirms lawful town-centre parking around the square, including 10 P30 spaces on Market Place West and accessible spaces on Market Place East. PBT still withholds direct navigation until one specific parking point is independently map-checked; the Market Place sculpture/site coordinate is not a vehicle destination.
