(Image via sci.news)
Volunteer Writer: Emma Bowser
Email: ebowser@umassd.edu
Most people associate New Zealand with kiwi birds (a group of five species that make up the genus Apteryx), but as it turns out, the kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus) likely reached the island sooner, making it one of the truly ancient native species of the country.
The kākāpō is a species of parrot found in New Zealand that’s remarkable because it’s a nocturnal, flightless bird that makes its home on the ground, where it blends into the local flora. It looks strange for a bird, and some people even go so far as to say it could pass as one of Jim Henson’s Muppets.
It’s the world’s only flightless parrot and the world’s heaviest parrot, weighing around nine pounds on average. Because it’s nocturnal, it uses the whiskery feathers on its face to help it find food in the dark.
The herbivorous species climbs up trees from the ground to eat fruit from the tips of high rimu branches, juicy supplejack vines, and orchard tubers grubbed out of the ground.
They come in two colors: green and olive. Both colors are equally common, with the population evenly split between the two variations. Scientists believe this camouflage helped the birds hide from predators that relied on sight to locate prey.
Computer stimulants suggest that whichever color was rarer would have been less likely to be detected by predators, explaining why both colors persisted in the kākāpō population over time. Thus, the presence of an apex predator kept the gene pool balanced.
The population suffered when Europeans introduced invasive predators like cats and stoats to the area, which was devastating because the birds had never encountered mammalian predators before. As a result, the Kākāpō’s life span dropped from a maximum of 120 years, and its numbers were reduced to only 51 total individuals in 1995.
Since then, the Kākāpō Recovery Program has been working to save the species from going completely extinct by monitoring birds on three islands off of New Zealand: Codfish, Anchor, and Little Barrier Island—the only places in the world where Kakapo are known to exist. Now, there are approximately 250 birds in the wild.
The program’s workers focus on providing the birds with supplemental feed, ensuring the islands where the Kakapo remain are free of invasive predators, and, at times, hand-raising chicks that are underweight or sick.
In 2016, a small internet campaign began to bring awareness to the Kākāpō’s critically endangered status when some users of Imgur started reposting GIFs of the bird to the website, eventually covering the entire front page.
After this campaign, the species received a significant boost in popularity and uses have uploaded more GIFs, photos, videos, and artwork of the creature to Imgur.
Links to the Kākāpō Recovery Program’s donation page were also provided, and they raised over $3,000 for the cause in only two days.
For more information on how to donate to the program, click here.
They also offer the option to adopt a Kākāpō by sending a donation and receiving a certificate and email updates about your Kākāpō. If you choose a postage adoption instead of email adoption, they also send a Kākāpō plushie, bookmark, and sticker.
In 2023, they were finally reintroduced to New Zealand’s mainland, the first time Kākāpō have lived wild there in over 100 years. However, some birds had to be returned to their previous sanctuary after they attempted to escape and came dangerously close to human civilization.