North Island, New Zealand

This scene is an original illustration set in North Island, New Zealand. It lies in mid-latitudes, where the climate is oceanic — mild, wet through the year.

A plump flightless bird probes leaf litter with a long slender bill in a fern-forest clearing. Tall tree ferns with umbrella crowns stand around it, one young frond still coiled. The dawn light is low and gold, and the air is cool and damp.

Why are a kiwi's nostrils at the tip of its bill?

The nostrils are at the tip of that bill — almost uniquely among birds — because this one hunts by smell in the dark rather than by sight. Flightlessness at this size only persists where no ground mammals hunted for millions of years. Tree ferns with coiled emerging fronds belong to a cool, permanently moist temperate rainforest, not a tropical one.

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