The much-anticipated breeding season is now in full swing and has already broken records.

On the islands our ranger team, management staff and dedicated volunteers have been working hard to ensure that the kākāpō get the best start to the breeding season.

This year a huge amount of work is going into our assisted breeding (AB) programme and we’re also double clutching a large number of the females. We usually take eggs to incubate them ourselves as we have a higher success rate and leave the females with dummy eggs, but this year we’ve instead blocked off the nests for a number of females once we removed their eggs to encourage them to go and mate again. This will hopefully result in a huge number of eggs being laid and a large number of chicks hatching this season. Seems to be working well!

We currently have a total of 189 eggs laid and 37 chicks currently alive.