In 1976 management of the Brown Teal captive breeding programme was delegated to the conservation group Ducks Unlimited (NZ) by the NZ Wildlife Service.
This programme achieved an extraordinary high level of success. There were a number of key factors which accounted for this success, which mainly were;
1. The natural selection technique which allows each Brown Teal to choose its own mate
2. The placement of each pair of naturally paired teal in their own specially designed aviary
3. Having the technical knowledge about captive food and captive habitat requirements
4. Removing progeny at an early stage to encourage birds to re-nest and increase productivity
5. Removing the first clutch of eggs, incubating these by other Means, therefore encouraging the female to re-nest
6. Leaving parents to rear at least one brood/season
7. The enthusiasm, dedication and considerable financial contribution from Brown Teal breeders

Prior to 1976 a Brown Teal captive breeding programme had been started in the 1974 by the NZ Wildlife Service, when Brown Teal were removed from Great Barrier Island by the NZ Wildlife Service and supplied to a few experienced aviculturists. One pair from this translocation successfully reared a brood of five within four months of being placed in an aviary. This was an aviary eight metres long, two metres wide, good ground cover and with a pond one metre wide and two and a half metres long. This confirmed the earlier experience of the few pioneer Brown Teal breeders, that Brown Teal readily accept being confined in a small aviary.

The progeny from the breeding successes of the 1974 capture of teal formed the basis of Brown Teal captive breeding programme.

The captive population was further increased in 1976 when 23 teal were transferred from Great Barrier Island and added to the captive population, in 1987 when 15 teal from Great Barrier were added to the captive population, and in 2002 another 16 birds from Great Barrier were added to the captive population.

Results from 1976 onwards have shown that given a suitable captive environment Brown Teal are a relatively easy species to keep in captivity; they are long lived and with a well mated pair successful breeding will occur for a period of somewhere between 10 & 12 years, before productivity ceases, or becomes very spasmodic.

A strongly mated pair of Brown Teal become extremely and quite unbelievably territorial, and totally intolerant of all other waterfowl species and must be retained in their own specially designed aviary.

The aggressive nature of Brown Teal is such that in 1957, when Peter Scott first obtained Brown Teal at the Wildfowl Trust in the UK, he said that he hoped that New Zealander's were not of a similar nature! This is indeed a unique feature of Brown Teal behaviour.