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QUICK FACTS
Title: Kākāpō (Strigops habroptila), also called the owl parrot
The place it lives: Off the coast of New Zealand on the Codfish, Maud and Little Barrier Islands
What it eats: Kākāpō are vegetarians. Their eating regimen varies with the seasons and contains tubers, fruits, seeds, leaf buds, younger plant shoots, fungi and moss.
The very first thing that you will discover about kākāpō — a kind of huge, flightless parrot discovered solely in New Zealand — is how rotund they’re.
They’ve endearingly spherical heads and our bodies, owl-like faces and durable legs, and they’re the largest of all trendy parrots; males measure as much as 25 inches (64 centimeters) lengthy and might weigh practically 9 kilos (4 kilograms). Kākāpō are additionally one of many longest-lived birds on the planet, estimated to succeed in 90 years.
The identify “kākāpō” means “evening parrot” within the Māori language, a reference to the birds’ nocturnal habits. Although kākāpō can’t fly, they’ll stroll for lengthy distances and are agile climbers, clambering and leaping from timber utilizing their shortened wings for stability.
After they sense hazard, kākāpō freeze in place, and their mottled emerald-green plumage renders the birds practically invisible towards the leafy forest backdrop. The feathers of the male kākāpō have a particular odor that scientists have described as “candy and vegetative,” and this highly effective scent might play a job in males’ mating success.
Mating in kākāpō can also be distinctive, as they’re the one parrot species to exhibit a conduct referred to as lekking. Males create a stage of types, shaping a shallow bowl-shaped despair within the floor. They then crouch of their bowl and name for females utilizing two completely different sounds: a sequence of low-frequency “booms” that sound like a tuba, punctuated by a high-pitched “ching.” Males might growth and ching for eight hours at a stretch, persevering with nightly for 2 or three months.
Nonetheless, within the absence of feminine consideration some males have been identified to direct their affections elsewhere. In 1990, creator Douglas Adams wrote about an uncommon encounter with an amorous kākāpō, describing it in his e-book “Final Probability to See” (Penguin Random Home, 1992). The incident came about whereas Adams was recording a phase for a BBC radio programme about endangered species.
“When one of many rangers who was working in an space the place kākāpōs have been booming occurred to go away his hat on the bottom,” Adams wrote, “he got here again later to discover a kākāpō trying to ravish it.”
Scientists who work with kākāpōs even constructed a rubber “ejaculation helmet” to accommodate a kākāpō named Sirocco, who was infamous for attempting to mate with individuals’s heads. The helmet had a dimpled floor, appropriate for gathering sperm to be used in synthetic insemination.
The birds breed as soon as each two to 4 years, when native rimu timber produce an plentiful crop of berries. These fruits are wealthy in calcium and vitamin D, important vitamins for egg laying and for nourishing rising chicks.
Kākāpō thrived for tens of thousands and thousands of years throughout New Zealand, the place they’d no pure predators. However with the arrival of Polynesian individuals round 700 years in the past, the birds’ numbers started to drop. Their decline accelerated when Europeans colonized New Zealand within the early 1800s. Deforestation and the introduction of mammalian predators, comparable to rats, cats and stoats, introduced kākāpō to the brink of extinction, and by the 1900s, they’d all however vanished.
However within the Nineteen Seventies, conservationists found a breeding inhabitants of about 200 birds. For many years they labored to guard kākāpō and safe their future, transferring them to the three islands the place they dwell at this time (and the place all invasive carnivores have since been eradicated). At present there are about 242 kākāpō within the wild, and they’re acknowledged as critically endangered with a excessive threat of extinction.
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