🦜 GOOD NEWS: There are more kākāpō alive right now than at any point in about 75 years. Ninety chicks were added to the official count on September 1, taking the population from 235 to 325.
In 1995, when New Zealand's recovery program started, there were 51 kākāpō left. Twenty of them were female.
Ninety chicks in one season is a record. In the early years of the program, producing that many took sixteen years.
The kākāpō is the heaviest parrot on earth, making it unable to fly. When threatened, it freezes in place, relying on its moss-green camouflage. That worked much better against native predators than against introduced cats, rats, and stoats.
Breeding is the other problem. They only nest in years when the rimu tree fruits heavily, which happens every two to four years and can't be forced. This year the rimu came in hard on the Fiordland islands, and for the first time in a while the mothers there needed no supplementary food at all.
This was also the season three four-year-old females bred, the youngest ever recorded. Ten chicks came from artificial insemination, used to pair up birds that are genetically good matches. And only two chicks ended up hand-reared. The rest were raised entirely by kākāpō mothers, which is the direction the program has been pushing toward for years.
There's one problem created by all this, and it's a good one to have.
Their existing breeding islands are already full. The search is on for another safe breeding site, because officials say they'll desperately need one after the next breeding season. And that may come sooner than expected: temperature modelling suggests the birds could breed again in 2028.