Amidst all the terrible things going on right now, I am taking some comfort in kākāpō conservation.
Kākāpō are round flightless nocturnal green parrots from New Zealand, and they are tragically endangered (235 adults). However! Their current breeding season has gone very well so far—all the eggs have hatched now, with 92 living chicks as of the last update.
The babies are born looking rather like
little balls of
vibrating dryer lint, progress through fluff to vaguely bird-shaped scraggle, and eventually get green feathers poking through the white fluff.
This year there was a nest cam—past tense as those birds have
flown walked out of the nest and the solar energy was getting unreliable anyway, but the highlights
are still up.) The mother here is
Rakiura (known for reusing her nest every mast year—most kākāpō move around more). Also, she has
fanart on tumblr. (
Image link just in case that doesn't work.)
Other highlights:
One female, Whetū, nested in a hollow tree, significantly off the ground. The rangers were worried about a clumsy young chick climbing down from there, so they
built a ramp. The chick
used it to exit safely!Another, Rimu (named for the tree that triggers breeding years with its masts) nested up at the top of a cliff. Lovely view, but again, the rangers were very worried about her chick, which they couldn't even confirm existed for a long time—her transmitter showed she was probably feeding one, but an entrance directly onto a cliff ledge seemed very dangerous for a clumsy youngster. So the rangers ended up
digging into her nest to make a new, safer exit.
Kohengi being very photogenic with
eggs and
chick.Mother kākāpō gamely tries to
brood chicks that are getting to be about her size.
Male kākāpō Sinbad booming
booming (showing off, and looking adorably spherical).
Chicks
moved between nests (usually to an island with a better food source). (It is lucky for the conservation team that mother kākāpō do not easily abandon disturbed nests, and also that they don't really have a concept of "a baby that is not mine.")
Kākāpō
fertility science in cartoon form.
That time
back in 2014 Lisa stepped on her egg and the team carefully patched it up and incubated it and got a living bird out of it (one of six to fledge that year!)
I've been following
Biologist Andrew Digby on Bluesky, the
Kakapo Files podcast and the
Kākāpō Recovery instagram (imginn link in case you don't have an account).
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