[Anonymous]

Breeding success for rare kakapo

Wellington, New Zealand

Down on a lonely island off the southern tip of New Zealand,
three new kakapo have just been born.

These new chicks bring the total number of one of the world’s rarest birds to
86.

The critically endangered kakapo – fat, green, musty-smelling nocturnal
parrots, which cannot fly but which can climb trees – are confined to New
Zealand’s offshore islands.

Once, they roamed mainland New Zealand from sea level to the mountains.

Decimated by introduced predators, the kakapo population dwindled to just 51
in the mid-1990s, but an intensive conservation effort has boosted kakapo
numbers in the past few years.

Productive year

Three years ago, 24 kakapo ( Strigops habroptilus ) chicks were born,
but last year three of those birds died of blood poisoning.

This breeding season, thanks to a supply of the kakapo’s favoured diet, the
fruit of the rimu tree, 25 eggs have been laid.

Of those 10 are fertile; three have hatched and five more are
expected to produce chicks.

“The maximum we can get is 10 (chicks) but that’s if we are being
unrealistically optimistic,” says Graeme Elliott, a Department of Conservation
scientist on Whenua Hou/Codfish Island, the kakapo stronghold at the bottom of
New Zealand.

“Two of the eggs just don’t look quite right so they have probably died. But
we can’t risk finding out yet so we will leave them there for a bit longer.”

Warming pads

The new chicks, whose feathers are initially white before turning grey and
then green, have been born to Flossie and Margaret-Maree.

Flossie has two chicks, unofficially called Dit and Dot, and Margaret-Maree
has one, named, for now, Mmm, by her carers.

We’ve lost eggs in the past from birds going a bit crazy trying to fight off parasites, getting all scratchy and then crushing their eggs

“We’ve got to call them something in the meantime,” explains Dr
Elliott.

To ensure as many eggs and chicks as possible survive, the care is
comprehensive.

Every night, each nest has one or two people camping nearby. Whenever a
kakapo mother leaves the nest, she triggers an infrared beam which is turn
alerts the volunteers, or nest-minders as they are called, to her excursion.

“If the bird gets off the nest then we leave it a little while and go and put
one of the heat pads on the nest while she’s away so the whole thing stays
warm,” says Dr Elliott.

Clumsy scratchers

The nest-minders also keep an eye on the adult kakapo’s health.

“The idea of that is to see if they are doing anything unusual, like if they
are scratching with lots of parasites,” says Dr Elliott.

“We’ve lost eggs in the past from birds going a bit crazy trying
to fight off parasites, getting all scratchy and then crushing their eggs.”

And the new chicks are checked each night. “When we’ve got chicks… there
are a couple of extra things we do. We weigh and inspect the chicks every night
to see if they are going all right,” Dr Elliott says.

While it is the fruit of the rimu that appears to be a key trigger for the
slow-breeding kakapo, this summer the Department of Conservation has also been
testing a diet of other green or unripe fruits.

Promising times

Half of the adult females and some genetically under-represented males were
fed green walnuts, while green pine conelets were fed to the remaining females
and males on Whenua Hou.

But, says Dr Elliott, the rimu fruiting has masked whether there
was any impact of the supplementary feeding.

“There’s a little hint that [the supplementary feeding] might have helped
because this is the lowest amount of rimu fruit in which we’ve had breeding,” he
says.

“But it is only the sort of breeding we normally get in a small mast
[fruiting].”

Nonetheless, if the three new chicks and the five chicks expected to arrive
in the next few weeks all make it, the world’s kakapo population will be the
largest it has been in almost 25 years.

[Author]

March 28, 2005 at 10:22 AM