How Thermal and Night Vision Technology Can Transform Conservation (NZCS X Night Vision NZ)

The best experiences come from the smallest comments.

For years, we’d talked about exploring how technology intersects with conservation.  But there are major challenges to making that a reality.The problem was simple: to show how technology can benefit conservation, you actually need access to that technology. And that’s easier said than done.

That’s where we found ourselves in 2025. Four of us, James, Dave, Sam and Johnny, on a Zoom call, planning a trip built around a single question: what would it actually take to showcase how technology can impact conservation?

We worked backwards from a deliberately uncomfortable thought experiment.

What if there was still a mainland kākāpō out there?

It’s not as absurd as it sounds. The little spotted kiwi was recently rediscovered after fifty years presumed extinct in the wild. If a kākāpō had survived, it wouldn’t be obvious. It would be a needle-in-a-haystack problem: a single or few old flightless green birds hidden somewhere across thousands of kilometres of forest across Fiordland, Rakiura, the West Coast and northwest Nelson, some of the most rugged terrain on Earth.

To be clear, the goal was never to find a kākāpō. That would have been amazing, but it certainly wasn’t the primary focus. The point was to use a plausible engaging case study to demonstrate how emerging technologies could transform the way we search for species, and how we might engage the public in how emerging technologies could be transformative for the future of conservation in New Zealand.

So there we were, James, Dave, Sam and Jonny, planning a trip and working backwards to determine what you’d actually need to find a kākāpō if it remained. We agreed you’d need a credible recent sighting. Then ecoacoustic technology, drones, eDNA, and thermal and night-vision equipment.

Of all of them, thermal and night vision felt like the linchpin.

Between 1960 and 1997, hundreds of kākāpō search trips were undertaken across Nelson, Fiordland and Rakiura. Only a handful of birds were ever found without the help of trained tracker dogs, most of them males booming, an event that can occur only once every two to five years. Without dogs, you need a way to both detect presence and identify what you’re detecting, in dense bush, at night, often in awful weather.

Thermal and night vision don’t solve everything. Kākāpō sleep in burrows. Visibility in the bush is limited. Nothing about this is a silver bullet. But they dramatically reduce the risk of simply missing what’s there.

There’s a famous story about Hoki, a hand-reared female kākāpō in the 1990s. Her keepers once became convinced she’d escaped her enclosure. They searched for over an hour, only to finally spot her when she blinked. That was inside a small enclosure. Not the bush. It’s easy to underestimate just how challenging it is to find species that have evolved to stay hidden in the New Zealand wilderness.

That’s the power of these tools. It provides efficiency. 

Thermal allows you to rapidly eliminate areas you might otherwise spend hours combing through. Night vision lets you identify what you’re actually looking at without blasting torches and spooking animals. For nocturnal species, that difference really matters.

So we reached out to Ken at Night Vision NZ. He loved the idea and sent us both a DNT Hound 635R thermal Monocular and a DNT Optic Zulus Night Vision Scope. 

Night-vision and thermal scopes work in fundamentally different ways. Night vision amplifies available light, such as moonlight or starlight (often with infrared assistance), to produce a detailed image that looks similar to what the human eye would see in low light, making it well suited to navigation and identifying objects or animals.

Thermal scopes, on the other hand, detect heat differences rather than light, allowing warm animals or people to stand out clearly against cooler surroundings, even in total darkness, fog, or light vegetation, though with less fine detail. In short, night vision is better for recognising what you’re looking at, while thermal vision is better for quickly detecting that something is there.

This gave us two powerful tools to use in our search for a kākāpō, but more critically, it allowed us to demonstrate how thermal and night vision can cut hours of time searching in poor-light areas. If a call is heard, within moments you can establish, using two different technologies, whether something is present and then what it is you’re actually looking at. The real clincher for us, and what made it a game-changer, was the ability to record what we were seeing on the SD cards that the equipment carried. 

Things moved quickly from there. While our original trip had been planned for Fiordland, we were passed on a compelling recent sighting of a kākāpō on the remote West Coast of New Zealand. It met our criteria for being reasonable to investigate and sat within the historic range of the species. We found five unconnected reports of kākāpō from the same three-kilometre area, including historic letters in archives New Zealand..

The area had also been followed up by an independent former DOC staff member who had heard kākāpō-like calls and was not associated with the original sighting. We were also passed on feathers which appeared pending a DNA test we are still waiting on, to be kākāpō. Four of the five experts we spoke to felt they looked like kākāpō feathers.

It wasn’t definitive. And we’re careful not to pretend it is. But it was compelling enough to investigate, and importantly, it filled a gap DOC simply doesn’t have the resources to chase.

It’s important to be clear. The New Zealand bush is full of false signals. Kākāpō can boom, ching, grunt and skraark but so can other species. Bittern boom. Ruru ching. Weka drum. Pigs grunt. Kea and kākā scream. Without tools, uncertainty compounds quickly.

We discovered this on our first night on the West Coast. Deep in a remote valley, we heard a faint booming call off to our left. We froze. For a moment, hope surged and our eyes widened. Surely this wasn’t what we were seeking so soon? 

Sam and I switched to thermal and night vision and started recording. Almost immediately, we could see movement, too small. We moved closer and confirmed it was a weka. 

Disappointing? Sure. But also a perfect demonstration of the technology’s value. The bush played with sound and the ‘weka drumming’ was hard to locate, and to us sounded far further away and like muffled booming. Once closer it was evident it was Weka but on a wet rainy night it sounded like it was booming from further away.

Fifty years ago, many searchers would have chased that sound blindly, burning energy and morale. Some early Wildlife Service volunteers lacked deep bush experience. Even experienced bushmen can make mistakes (like we did) when working with multiple sounds (wind, rain, drumming, muffled sounds) all at once. While experienced bushmen might not struggle to tell the difference between a kākāpō and a weka, a volunteer could, even more so when you factor in bittern booming.

Thermal and night vision mean that even in dense bush you can quickly identify the bird without wasting time or turning on torches that would scare it away. We felt like idiots thinking it had been a Kakapo. But equally the right technology saved us crashing off on a wild goose chase on a wet evening. 

Soon after, we heard parrot-like screeching. Swapping to night vision, we saw a bird flying away, likely a kea. Without night vision, we might still have suspected kea, but for the inexperienced, which was common many decades ago, there would have been no way to confirm it. 

Similarly we picked up an abundance of Ruru on our thermals, more than we were hearing. Though part of that may have been due to the weather. This was important as Ruru can make a chinging call that might be mistaken for a Kakapo. To be able to get a more accurate sense of the Ruru population was invaluable. 

Then came the outlier.

Late one night, from a brutally steep gully we couldn’t safely access, we heard a series of deep, grunting calls Parrot-like, but deep almost Pig-like too. We weren’t recording. It and it only happened one time. However our thermals plainly showed no pigs in the gully. No kea or kākā emerged. Nor could we see any in the canopy. The bush floor was too dense to see everything, and the weather was foul, but through elimination, we knew it wasn’t anything familiar, and we were confident it wasn’t any form of animal. 

Does that mean kākāpō? No. And it’s important to say that plainly. The bush holds mysteries without needing conclusions forced onto them. But we wouldn’t have confidently been able to eliminate so many species without the tools we had. 

That’s the real story here. Not rediscovery, spectacle or groundbreaking work. But efficiency. 

And that’s the true value of stories like this. It’s not the glitz or the glamour. It’s not “finding something”. It’s efficiency.

Conservation is a resource game in an underfunded sector. Organisations have limited time, energy and funding. We believe many of the answers conservation requires lie in emerging technologies. Every saved hour matters. Every piece of friction that is reduced frees effort that can be used or multiplied elsewhere. Thermal and night Vision technology allow animal counts and searches to be more efficient, they reduce the time required in the field, provide greater accuracy, and free us up to utilise those resources elsewhere. 

Thermal and night vision aren’t just useful for kākāpō. They provide a real world alternative to using tracking dogs to find little spotted Kiwi, accurate Ruru counts, pest monitoring, deer density assessments. They let small teams do more with less, and that’s where the future lies.

We might be forty years too late to find a mainland kākāpō. But the mystery remains. And more importantly, so does opportunity.

If we can show how technology works in the real world, maybe we can inspire a generation of Kiwis to ask how their own skills, engineering, data, software, design, might quietly, practically, change the future of conservation.

And it all started with a few comments on a Zoom call, and a local NZ Business that wanted to help us achieve something extraordinary.

You can learn more about Night Vision NZ's amazing work here.