The call of the North Island Robin has not been heard on the Coromandel Peninsula for more than a century.
Now it is back, thanks to the efforts of the local community.
It has been a long journey. The original Coromandel Robins disappeared when their habitat was destroyed by forestry, farming and predators like rats and stoats.
The birds released today were caught in the Pureora forest in the central North Island, where they were trained to return to the same spot for food each day so they would not just fly away when they were released in the Coromandel.
"It's harder to train the females - they tend to sit back and the males come in first. The males are also quite aggressive to the females. They'll chase them away so we had to make sure we had an even gender split of females to males," says Wendy Davis from the Department of Conservation.
The people here also run the country's most successful kiwi breeding programme, but there are also birds here that are even rarer than kiwis - teal ducks, the fourth most threatened waterfowl in the world
Today though, the Robins stole everyone's thunder. But as performers go, never let anyone tell you that robins are easy to work with.
3 News