The pied stilt arrived in New Zealand sometime around 1800, most likely from Australia, without any introduction programme, consultation, or planning of any kind. It appeared on braided riverbeds and wetlands, found the conditions workable, and expanded. By the early 1990s there were around 30,000 of them. This is how self-introductions tend to go when the habitat is right and nothing is actively working against them. Poaka is visually unambiguous. Black back and wings, black running down the back of the neck, white everywhere else, and legs that are startlingly long and vivid pink. In flight, those legs trail noticeably beyond the tail, giving the bird a slightly unfinished look from behind, as though the designer ran short of body before the legs were complete. On the ground the proportions produce a slightly top-heavy quality. It moves gracefully despite this, wading through shallows with careful, high-lifted steps and an air of focused, unhurried purpose. The call is a repeated yapping, constant and emphatic, particularly when anything perceived as a threat enters the vicinity. Poaka will mob birds considerably larger than themselves and dive repeatedly at people walking near a nest. There is a meaningful gap between the alarm response and the body mass, but the bird does not appear to have registered this. The nesting territory is defended with the energy of something considerably bigger, and the noise scales accordingly. Nesting occurs in loose colonies on shingle beds, lake margins, and open pasture. Both parents incubate and defend the nest, deploying the yapping and mobbing behaviour consistently from first egg to fledging. The eggs are cryptically patterned and sit in scrapes on bare ground. The most visible thing about a pied stilt nest site is usually the adults flying overhead making noise about it. Camouflage from below; disclosure from above. There is an ecological complication worth noting. The pied stilt hybridises readily with the critically endangered black stilt, or kakī, which has a total breeding population of only a few hundred birds. Hybrid pairs produce fertile offspring that look intermediate and are difficult to identify in the field, diluting the kakī gene pool steadily with each generation. DOC manages this by locating and removing hybrid birds from braided river breeding grounds in the upper Waitaki basin each season. The poaka itself requires no management whatsoever. Its population is stable, its status is secure, and it arrived here entirely on its own initiative.