Bouncing back Andrew Digby/New Zealand Department of Conservation

As I reach up into the manuka tree, the shaggy, whiskered face of a giant parrot stares back at me before it turns away from my grasp. Fortunately, my colleague Daryl Eason manages to grab its large foot and slip a bag over its head, barely wincing when its huge bill clamps down on his finger.

We’re not here on Whenua Hou Island, off the southern tip of New Zealand, to harm the kakapo – we’re here to save the species, one bird at a time. The world’s largest parrot, the kakapo is flightless and has been under siege from cats and other non-native mammalian predators, leaving it close to extinction.


Back from the brink

Today, there are 123 adult birds sheltered on island refuges away from these invaders, and we are using every available technological gadget and piece of scientific know-how to breed these birds back from the brink.

The big bird in the bag is Gulliver, and we push our way through thick scrubby vegetation to inspect and weigh him, and check his transmitter harness. Every adult kakapo alive wears one of these tracking devices. Monitored by plane, satellites and rangers on the ground, the data it transmits tells us when each bird is mating and nesting, and even who they have mated with.

Andrew Digby/New Zealand Department of Conservation

In the breeding season, males develop an inflatable boom sac for calling to females, and Gulliver’s is huge, indicating he’s in the perfect condition to mate. Beneath the trees, artificial insemination expert Sushil Sood massages a few precious drops of semen from his cloaca, and checks its condition under a microscope.

Meanwhile, team manager Deidre Vercoe collects blood from the bird. This will tell us how healthy he is, including his vitamin D levels. Our recent research has shown that kakapo, which are nocturnal so don’t often come into contact with sunlight, have very low vitamin D levels. They feed their chicks the vitamin D-rich berries of the rimu tree, but the tree only bears fruit every two or three years, and the birds can only breed in those years.

Sequencing a species

To help the birds along, we have been experimenting with food supplement pellets, low in protein and rich in calcium, to help the birds reach peak fitness during the breeding season. Analysis of Gulliver’s blood will tell us if this is working.

DNA in his blood will also be sequenced. Earlier this year, we embarked upon an ambitious project to sequence the genome of every living kakapo – the first time anyone has tried to sequence a whole species.

Feeding frenzy Andrew Digby/New Zealand Department of Conservation

A whoop of delight from Sood tells us Gulliver’s semen quality is good, and suitable for artificial insemination. Each breeding season, we attempt to artificially inseminate every adult female that has already mated, to boost each female’s chance of successfully hatching a chick.

It takes a lot of work, but doing this means we can ensure the genetic health of the species. In the 1990s, there were just 51 birds left, but we hope to avoid inbreeding by using genetic data to make sure that chicks are produced by the best possible combination of parents. Gulliver is genetically distinct from many of today’s kakapo, so would be an ideal father, but at 18 years old, he is still to father a single chick.

Perfect match

We trek along tracks through the thick forest for an hour to find Kuihi, a female who would be a good genetic match for Gulliver. She is high up in a rimu tree, so we wait until nightfall, when she is likely to climb down.

As the forest grows dark, the deep mating calls of male kakapo boom around us. Once Kuihi’s transmitter tells us that she has reached the forest floor, we run after her by torchlight, through thick bush and down steep gullies, finally catching her at one of our supplementary feeding stations. Courtship between a male and a female can last for over an hour, but it takes just a few minutes to inseminate Kuihi, and allow her to run back into the night.

The next generation Andrew Digby/New Zealand Department of Conservation

But this nocturnal liaison doesn’t mark the end of our season’s work. Until May, we will be camping out in tents near every nest. Cameras and transmitters will tell us when a mother leaves her chicks, allowing us to weigh them without disturbing her, and alert us when the nest is in danger from other birds.

For us, it’s exhausting work but it’s paying off. This year we are on course to beat our previous 2009 record of 33 chicks. There has been a huge crop of rimu berries, and despite losing some chicks in the past week, we currently have 37 chicks plus 1 fertile egg left to hatch.

We have had around 40 conservationists and volunteers working round the clock since the breeding season began in October, and our intensive efforts probably make the kakapo’s sex life the most closely monitored of any in the world. But we would do just about anything to ensure the future of the world’s weirdest parrot.

Find out more about the race to save the kakapo, and other animals that need a helping hand to breed