Melanie flew via helicopter into Te Anau with him, and like a good surrogate-mum, made sure he was calm and rested, stayed at a good temperature, and had his regular feeds. At this age the chicks are fed every 4 hours, and he was due for a feed half way between Te Anau and Invercargill. This meant that Melanie had to feed him in the back seat of the car!

As you can see, the top of Hinemoa-2-A-19’s head was marked with orange nail polish so our team could tell him apart from the other kākāpō chicks that he was sharing an incubator with right from his first day of life. The team affectionately knew him as “Orange” for this reason.

The team can confidently tell whether the tiny chicks are female or male by taking culmen (beak) measurements – boys tend to have wider, short beaks while female beaks are longer and thinner.

When the chicks are roughly a month old, a couple of drops of blood will be taken from them to establish who the father is - important information for the genetics of the group, and from this, they can also confirm the sex of the chick. At the same time, the chick will also be microchipped (the same kind of chip we use at the zoo and that your local vet would use on your pet) to help with identifying them. The nail polish identifier on their head tends to rub off very quickly once the chick is in a nest with mum.