1 Dollar - Elizabeth II Berry Portrait, Takahe Bird

The takahē was declared extinct in 1898 after decades of habitat loss and predation by introduced mammals. That assumption held for fifty years until Geoffrey Orbell, a Southland doctor with a persistent hunch, located a living population in the Murchison Mountains in 1948 — one of the more remarkable rediscoveries in ornithological history. The species' appearance on this coin reflects a conservation urgency that was very real by the early 1980s, when the total population remained critically low and active recovery programs were still in their infancy.