Parrot

Usage examples of kakapo.

Adams and Carwardine spent the next year traveling the world and seeing endangered animals, like flightless kakapo parrots in New Zealand and baiji river dolphins in China.

I became increasingly morose over the next two or three days, because it became clear to us as we traipsed up and down endless hills in the rain, that we were not going to find a kakapo on Little Barrier Island.

When one of the rangers who was working in an area where kakapos were booming happened to leave his hat on the ground, he came back later to find a kakapo attempting to ravish it.

Stewart Island, in the south, where one or two kakapos are still found, is inhabited and no longer even remotely safe.

Any kakapos that are found there are trapped and airlifted to Codfish Island which is just nearby.

They've been used to trap the kakapos on Stewart Island so that they can then be airlifted to Codfish Island and here to Little Barrier Island by helicopter.

It's not very pleasant, but that's how the island was originally, and that's the only way kakapos can survive - in exactly the environment that New Zealand had before man arrived.

If you ask anybody who has worked with kakapos to describe them, they tend to use words like `innocent' and `solemn', even when it's leaping helplessly out of a tree.

I asked Dobby if they had given names to the kakapos on the island, and he instantly came up with four of them: Matthew, Luke, John and Snark.

On the one hand they regarded protection of the kakapos as being of paramount importance, and that meant keeping absolutely everybody who was not vital to the project away from Codfish Island.

Although tracker dogs are rigorously trained not to harm any kakapos they find, they can nevertheless sometimes find them a little too enthusiastically.

Arab had himself tracked many of the twenty-five kakapos that had been found on Stewart Island and airlifted by helicopter in soundproof boxes to Codfish.

You know that we didn't want you to come here, and that we didn't want to track kakapos and risk disturbing them, but as it happens .

Add those to the fourteen birds on Little Barrier and we have a total of only forty kakapos left altogether.

As we tread our way carefully back along the ridge to the helicopter I ask Don what he feels the long term prospects for the kakapos really are, and his answer is surprisingly apposite.