Can these chunky ground-dwelling parrots survive on their own?  

When a species’ population gets down to the double digits, extinction is usually near. But thanks to extraordinary measures taken by conservation teams in New Zealand, the kākāpō—a critically endangered parrot that looks like it would be at home in the Pokémon universe—is experiencing a hard-earned renaissance. 

The kākāpō lifestyle sounds like the setup to a riddle: It’s nocturnal, flightless, powerfully sweet-smelling, can outlive humans, and begins its courtships rituals when an ancient tree produces millions of tiny red fruit. “They’re the color of the forest when the sunlight is dappling through,” says Deidre Vercoe, operations manager for the kākāpō recovery group. “They have these big, gorgeous whiskers and they look really wise, like they’re sussing you out.” 

Vercoe and many others have spent decades giving kākāpō every conceivable advantage after invasive predators decimated the population. Think round-the-clock nest surveillance, wearable tech for birds, and sperm-delivery drones for artificial insemination. Their efforts have brought the tally of adult kākāpō from 51 in 1995 to, as of this year, 235. 

But with a baby boom in motion that could boost the population by up to 40 percent, the kākāpō’s stewards are confronted with a new problem—how do you wean an endangered species off intensive support without pushing them back to the brink of extinction?

For both budgetary and philosophical reasons, the kākāpō conservation team says it’s time to take a big step back on the technological bells and whistles that have allowed them to monitor every bird. 

“We can’t hold their hands for the next few thousand years. We have to let them do their own thing,” says Andrew Digby, science advisor for the kākāpō recovery group. “It’s a very exciting time, but it is a bit nerve-wracking.” 

“You do pretty much anything” 

Three hundred years ago, kākāpō were plentiful to the point of peskiness across several of the islands of New Zealand, relying on the cover of night and their mossy camouflage to evade the native birds of prey. But invasive predators, including cats, rats, dogs, and stoats—weasel-like carnivores that humans introduced in the late 1800s to control pest populations of rabbits—made easy meals of the flightless birds. 

Kākāpō were feared extinct in the early 1970s, and in the 1980s the few dozen stragglers that had been found in remote valleys and forests were whisked to tiny, predator-free islands. 

When Vercoe started as a kākāpō ranger in 2002, humans kept vigil over every single kākāpō nest in New Zealand, all night long. As soon as a kākāpō mom stepped off the nest to forage, Vercoe would crawl into the burrow to apply a heating pad to the chicks. “You do pretty much anything you think might improve their chances, even if you’re not entirely sure,” she recalls.

That level of nannying is now impossible with so many kākāpō nests, she says. It’s been a banner year for kākāpō breeding, a cycle that comes every two to four years with fruit bonanzas from the rimu tree, and this rimu season was the biggest on record. The team has tallied 150 fertile eggs, and, as of early June, there are 92 chicks still alive. 

Hands-on management is the reason kākāpō have made this remarkable recovery, conservationists say. But the scale of the intervention has gone a little overboard, Digby admits. “Kākāpō conservation is ridiculously intensive,” Digby says. “It’s one of the most intensively managed wild species in the world.”

Every kākāpō wears a tiny backpack that transmits their location, allowing the team to swoop in at the first signs of illness as well as register breeding attempts. (While mating lasts a few seconds for most birds, kākāpō can go at it for up to an hour, and the scientists have rigged the system to register a certain “gyration” pattern.)  When researchers realized that a female kākāpō’s weight predicted her breeding success and determined the sex of her chicks, they set up personalized weigh-and-feed stations to keep each would-be mom perfectly plump. Artificial insemination—with sperm sometimes delivered by drone to ensure maximum potency—has become routine. Many eggs are incubated in the comfort of rangers’ huts and subbed in for decoy eggs just before hatching, and chicks born to inexperienced females are often fostered by more seasoned mothers. 

This level of intervention can’t scale with the rapidly growing population, which has more than doubled in the last 10 years, Digby says, and that’s not counting this year’s chicks. Even as the number of kākāpō has climbed, the staff allocated to them has stayed the same. Government funding plateaued, then dwindled, so the conservation team relies on a corporate sponsor and public donations for their operating budget.  

Philosophically, the team is eager to step back to help restore the birds’ mauri, or life force. Kākāpō are considered a taonga, or treasure, to the Ngāi Tahu, a Māori tribe who serve as the birds’ kaitiaki, or caretakers. “There’s a spirituality to us,” says Tāne Davis, who has represented his tribe in kākāpō recovery for decades. “It’s our responsibility to maintain that source of life, to avoid it from becoming extinct,” but also to preserve its “wildness.” 

Kākāpō deserve to “just be free…without being interfered with and tinkered with by humans all the time,” Vercoe says. 

But what was planned as a long, gradual draw-down of support from humans may need to be a more accelerated retreat. Forcing the issue is the matter of space—the three predator-free refuge islands the kākāpō call home were already at capacity before this breeding season, and “it’s not like you can just magic one of those sites up,” Vercoe says, joking that you can’t just conjure up another island. 

The team needs to see just how wild their kākāpō are prepared to be before these endangered birds can be reintroduced to more of their rightful habitat. 

Don’t count your eggs

This breeding cycle, the team performed a grand experiment to see how the birds fare with less intervention. “It means taking on greater risks, not being there to make sure that every single chick gets through,” Vercoe says. 

Each chick was given a rating of gold, silver, bronze, or chalk based on how important its genes are for the species. (Some genes are overrepresented due to particularly enthusiastic breeders like Blades, a kākāpō who fathered 22 chicks before being relegated to a bachelor-only reserve. Preserving other lineages—the descendants of the more sexually reticent birds—is critical for the species’ resilience.) 

On one island, called Whenua Hou, conservation continued as usual, with artificial insemination, remote incubation, parrot chow buffets for females, and regular in-person nest checks. This is where most of the high-priority gold and silver level chicks hatched.  

But on Anchor Island, some of the gutter guards were removed. They relied on natural breeding and allowed the kākāpō to incubate their eggs themselves—a perilous proposition because of seabirds called petrels that are known to invade nests. And while the team aim to have each kākāpō mom rear a single chick at a time, this year they’ve allowed two to a nest.

So far, the results have been encouraging but not without casualties. The chicks on Anchor Island seem to be just as robust as the ones on Whenua Hoa, Digby says, thanks to their hardworking moms and the bumper crop of rimu this year. However, petrels have killed two chicks and cracked several eggs on Whenua Hoa, a first for the program, while several chicks on Anchor Island died when water unexpectedly flooded the nest.  

And the chalk chicks? They’re living almost completely hands-off. On Chalky Island, the scientists weren’t even certain how many eggs hatched for the first couple months but now know the hatch rates have been excellent. “The whole premise of doing less is working really well,” Digby says. 

But the kākāpō recovery team are all too aware how precarious their successes are. In 2019, a promising breeding cycle was shattered by an outbreak of a fungal infection called Aspergillosis. The disease ultimately killed 9 nesting females, chicks, and juveniles, a substantial percentage of the population at the time. 

“There’s a big part of me that just can’t relax yet, until we get through 150 days,” Vercoe says. That’s when young kākāpō become independent enough to finally be added to the population tally. 

Kākāpō, anonymous

The first order of business after the chicks fledge will be kākāpō house-hunting. There are remote places “where we could safely tuck birds away,” Vercoe says, but “we’re looking for sites where we can learn about how to have them back on the mainland, in areas where there are risks.” 

High on the list of potential reintroduction sites is Te Puka-Hereka—the “bachelor pad” island that Blades was banished to, Digby says. “That’s quite a big step, because we think there are probably a couple of stoats on that island, and we haven’t had female kākāpō around stoats.” Male kākāpō seem to be large enough to hold their own against the invasive, weasel-like predators, but smaller-bodied females and chicks left on the nest while mom forages will be vulnerable. 

Another candidate is a fenced-in conservation area on the mainland, where a handful of male kākāpō were introduced in 2023. But while the fences seem to be effective at keeping predators out, they’re not great at keeping high-climbing kākāpō in—several kākāpō’s dogged attempts to escape eventually wore down the conservation team, who returned them to the island sanctuaries. (Why did the kākāpō climb the fence? In one case, invasive blackberry bushes.) 

Vercoe says the team’s ultimate aspiration are “anonymous kākāpō”—“no one knows who they are, who their parents are, anything about them.” At the urging of the Ngāi Tahu, a percentage of this year’s chicks won’t be named, and Digby says they hope to start removing the tracking backpacks from some of the birds soon. 

But without GPS, how will the team know whether the kākāpō are still alive? It’s a serious challenge in a nocturnal species so expertly camouflaged. (Kākāpō are hide-and-seek champions—several birds in the breeding program have gone missing for years and occasionally decades at a time, only to later reappear. The current record holder is Rangi, who hid from the conservation team for 21 years after a transmitter failure.) They plan for infrequent check-ins with thermal drones or environmental DNA surveillance, a technique that uses fragments of DNA left behind in air, water, or soil to detect a species’ presence. 

“In my dream future, we would go to a kākāpō island every five years, walk around take a whole bunch of soil samples, and from that be able to tell roughly how many kākāpō might be there,” Digby says.       

Until that day comes, the kākāpō caretakers are doing their best to step back, but it’s a challenging mental shift. One bird on Chalky Island has nested on the very edge of a cliff with a 200-foot drop. “We’re quite worried that her chicks, when they fledge, will probably fall,” Digby said in late April. “We might just have to let nature take its course.”

By early May, the chick’s fate had been decided. After “quite a bit of debate” on the merits of a hands-off approach, Digby says kākāpō rangers had tunneled a new entrance to the burrow. Inside, they found one infertile egg and one particularly plump chick. Thanks to days of digging from the rangers, that chick could sire new generations of kākāpō for the next 80 years.