A public-private partnership with the Department of Conservation and Te Rūnunga o Makaawhio of Ngāi Tahu, it hatches eggs of the kiwi species rowi and Haast tokoeka retrieved from the wild.

Benton had purchased the International Antarctic Centre from Christchurch Airport in 2000 and set up a facility for rehabilitation of the local white-flippered subspecies of blue penguin (kororā).

Kiwi chicks are extremely vulnerable to predators such as stoats, so DOC rangers collect eggs to incubate, hatch, and rear in captivity and in predator-free "creches", returning the birds to the wild when they reach an adult weight of 1 kg, sufficient to resist attack by a stoat or feral cat.

[13] A tracking technology known as "Sky Ranger" sends information on nesting pairs, eggs, and the age of an egg to a light aircraft which avoids rangers having to track kiwi on foot through dense forest – a one-hour flight gathers information that could have taken three weeks to gather on the ground.

A few days later, the young bird is dry and mobile and is transferred to a brood box, where it can walk around and be fed on a diet of mixed oxheart, cat biscuits, fruit, peas, carrots, corn, and vitamins.

[9] The juvenile birds are transferred to a predator-free "creche" in the wild – Motuara Island in the Marlborough Sounds for rowi.

[17] Kiwi chicks hatched in the wild have a mortality rate of 95%, which is lowered to 30% by the Operation Nest Egg captive rearing programme.

[2] Operation Nest Egg has been responsible for raising the wild population of rowi from just 165 ageing adults in the 1990s to 600 (as of 2019[update]).