This talk examines that question through the history of the takahē, a flightless rail in Aotearoa New Zealand. Rediscovered in 1948 after it had been presumed extinct, the takahē became the focus of a long and ambitious recovery programme. The talk traces how takahē recovery unfolded as a decades-long process of learning to know the birds. Conservationists had to understand how they paired, nested, fed, moved through alpine territory, and reacted to human presence. That knowledge was not separate from intervention; it was produced through it. The more closely people worked with the birds, the more they had to decide when to step in, how far to go, and what forms of disturbance the birds could bear. Conservation emerges here as practical, intimate, and uneasy work, built over years of observation, experiment, and revision.
Based on archival research and oral history interviews, this talk argues that intimate knowledge has been central to species recovery, even though it often sits uneasily within conservation science and management. Through the takahē, I show how endangered species conservation has relied on sustained attempts to know animals closely enough to intervene, while never escaping uncertainty about what intervention might do.
Monica Vasile is an environmental historian and anthropologist based at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her research examines how species recovery, reintroduction, rewilding, and ecological restoration have been shaped by scientific knowledge and changing ideas about animals and nature in the long twentieth century.