A kiwi-shaped fejoa was found by Richard Everts in Hope, near Nelson.

Richard Everts​ was collecting feijoas in his backyard, near Nelson, when an oddly-shaped one caught his eye.

Lying beneath a tree, one of the much-loved fruits appeared to be in the shape of a kiwi bird.

The ​Hope resident said he noticed its shape straight away.

"It's the classic Kiwiana picture really, a combination of feijoa and kiwi."

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Everts said he was lucky to get to it before the dog did.

While he had seen a few oddly-shaped feijoas in his time, he had never come across one that resembled a bird before.

"Most of them are oval, but occasionally you get strange shapes from where they have rubbed up against a tree branch or something like that.

"It is just one of the box, it is freak of nature."

But not that freaky. Everts' feijoa kiwi has a northern rival in New Plymouth.

GRANT MATTHEW/STUFF Taranaki man Matthew Cooper's phone hasn't stopped ringing since he found a feijoa that looks like a kiwi.

Matthew Cooper, 70, was picking up feijoas off his driveway when he found his own feijoa shaped like a kiwi – and his comes with the classic worm-seeking beak.

"It was just sitting there on on its own. I picked it up and thought 'oh this looks different'. I didn't put it in with the others."

He took a couple of pictures of it and put it on Facebook to show his friends.

"So, that's about five people," he joked.

He immediately got comments from his son in New York and his daughter who is on holiday in Rio.

GRANT MATTHEW/STUFF Feijoas are not native to New Zealand but that doesn't stop them getting in the kiwi spirit.

He later put pictures of the little feijoa kiwi on some Taranaki buy and sell Facebook sites – just to show people, he said.

He soon had 869 hits and counting.

"My phone hasn't stopped, which is annoying."

Kiwi-shaped feijoa have featured in the media several times. In 2009, Mike Pero paid $1000 for a piece of fruit, on the condition that half the money was given to the Child Cancer Foundation.

Everts said he had no special plans for the kiwi-shaped fruit, other than to maybe eat it for dessert.

"It just seems a pity to cut it open."

Everts said the family loved feijoas so much so that they had about four feijoa trees and, at this time of year, the trees bore more fruit than they could process each day.

They ate them fresh when they were in season and froze the excess to make feijoa pudding the rest of the year around.