If you are a bird that does not fly, having two legs is pretty important. So when a wild kiwi lost one of his legs below the knee to a gin trap, a New Zealand zoo decided to help out this iconic native bird. The zoo decided to see if it could fit a prosthetic leg to the North Island brown kiwi. For help, the zoo turned to its neighbours – the Wellington Artificial Limb Board and the Weta Workshop, makers of special effects for movies such as Lord of the Rings and King Kong. To create a mould of the bird’s stump, Gina Acevedo, prosthetic and visual creature effects art director at Weta Workshop, used the same techniques on the kiwi as he would on a film star. [More]

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