Giant Kiwi – Orana Wildlife Park

That makes it the only surviving Kiwi Bacon kiwi this catalogue has been able to locate. The others are known only from archives: a revolving bird above the Farm Products building on Thorndon Quay in Wellington, photographed in December 1966; a near-tonne rotating sign hoisted onto the PDC roof in Palmerston North on 26 September 1970; and one in Hamilton whose site and fate have never been established.

It also complicates the count. Those records rest on a documented four-bird national programme in the early 1960s, with siblings named in Wellington, Auckland and Hamilton. A Christchurch bird is not in that list. Either the programme was larger than four, or the Christchurch kiwi is a later addition, or one of the named cities is wrong. The catalogue reports the discrepancy rather than quietly resolving it, because a family of objects reconstructed from fragments is exactly where a tidy answer would be least trustworthy.

What is certain is the outcome. Of a scattered set of mid-century rooftop advertisements, one survived – by being adopted by a zoo, where a kiwi at least belongs.