The kakapo (Strigops habroptila), a parrot native to New Zealand, just may be the world’s strangest bird. Giant and flightless, with an owlish face, it lives up to its Maori name, which translates to “night parrot.” When kakapos emerge each night from their hidden daytime roosts, they plod across the fern-laced forest floor, or use their powerful feet to climb into the tree canopy in search of fruits, seeds, tubers, flowers, shoots, and leaves. In austral summer (December through February), male kakapos gather at display areas, called leks, to compete for mates, and their booming calls can be heard reverberating through the forest for miles around. Those calls, which today are few and far between, might have gone completely silent had it not been for the efforts of a handful of scientists and volunteers desperately working to save the species.

Eaten almost to extinction by invasive predators, a mere 18 kakapos remained on Earth by the mid-1970s. But intensive human intervention over the past few decades—including the relocation of the remaining birds to predator-controlled offshore islands and the hand-rearing of chicks—has swelled kakapo numbers to more than 150 today. Biologists are more hopeful than ever that the species will recover. Yet that fate is far from assured.

Nurturing the population toward recovery requires costly round-the-clock attention during the nesting season. And now the birds have become numerous enough on the three islands where they’ve been relocated that they’re beginning to run out of space. As reported in this week’s bioGraphic feature “Eradication Nation,” New Zealand conservation biologists are pinning their hopes on an ambitious initiative to create new isolated safe havens for kakapos and other endangered native species—and eventually, to eradicate invasive predators across the mainland.