This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.
Kākāpō are avid walkers, wandering on strong legs for miles at a time and hiking up mountains to find mates. They’re keen climbers too, clambering up New Zealand’s 65-foot-high rimu trees on large claws to forage for red berries on the tips of the conifer’s branches.
But there’s one thing that the world’s heaviest parrot species can’t do: fly. With their bulky frames—males weigh up to nine pounds—and waddling gait, they have little chance of outrunning predators like stoats and feral cats. When threatened, the nocturnal parrots freeze, relying on their moss-green feathers to act as camouflage.
New Zealand was once a land of flightless birds like the extinct moa—no terrestrial mammalian predators in sight. That changed in the 13th century, when Māori voyagers brought rats and dogs, and again in the 19th century, when European settlers brought more rats, cats and mustelids like weasels, stoats and ferrets. These predators have played a major role in putting at risk some 300 native species on New Zealand’s two main islands and smaller offshore islands, taking an especially heavy toll on flightless birds like kākāpō.
Now listed as critically endangered, the kākāpō teetered on the edge of extinction in the mid-1900s due to hunting, predators and land clearance. From the 1970s, conservation efforts focused on managing the remaining kākāpō on the country’s offshore islands, where predators are systematically eradicated. Due to those ongoing efforts, which include breeding programs, veterinary treatment and supplementary food, parrot numbers have grown from fewer than 60 in 1995 to more than 200 today.
That success, plus lack of space in offshore islands, led New Zealand’s Department of Conservation and Ngāi Tahu, the Māori tribe whose people serve as traditional guardians of the kākāpō, to find a new habitat for the parrots. Starting…
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