Few who walk past the crashing Pacific breakers and through the white, sweeping dunes of Waipu will see the tiny bird nesting in its small sand hollow, camouflaged among the scattered shells. One casual step and another egg or chick could be crushed. If it remains unscathed, its distressed parents, frightened away by walkers and surfers, dogs and four-wheel-drives, might not reach it before it becomes too hot or too cold to survive.

I’m standing at the end of the long sandspit at the Waipu Wildlife Refuge, looking out across Bream Bay to the Hen and Chickens Islands, dark and craggy on the horizon. Abby Meagher, a Department of Conservation community relations shorebird ranger, points out two endangered New Zealand dotterels scampering around on the shore in their soft orange breeding plumage, but there’s no sign of the New Zealand fairy tern.

With only 36 individuals—including just 10 breeding pairs—left in the entire country, the endemic sub-species, Sterna nereis davisae, is New Zealand’s most critically endangered bird.

Walking down the Waipu sand-spit—three starkly beautiful kilometres of soft dunes, red grasses and scallop shells—Meagher describes the dynamic, shifting landscape, which is never the same from one season to the next. These constant changes are part of the challenge for the tern, as nesting grounds move with the sands. Only one chick fledged at Waipu in the past two seasons. “Fairy terns nest just above the high-tide line, so if we get one of our easterly storms or a high spring tide, the eggs or chicks can easily be washed away,” says Meagher. In an effort to improve the birds’ chances, she has created safer trial nesting sites deeper in the dunes, moving thousands of shells onto wide patches of sand and fencing them off—part of a strategy that DOC has had in place for the New Zealand fairy tern since 1983.

Numbers have doubled since the DOC programme began, and the goal is to increase the New Zealand fairy tern population to 100 by 2021. With this in mind, a further $89,000 has been allocated for habitat restoration at Mangawhai Spit Wildlife Refuge. The department has even investigated corporate sponsorship of the bird and garnered increased support from local residents, conservation groups, volunteers and schools. But in a move that has surprised locals, the single fairy tern warden position at Waipu was cut from the budget for the 2009/10 season, and now DOC’s new “optimisation project” could result in the fairy tern being left to its own devices.