There are fewer than 250 kākāpō left on Earth. The conservation team that protects them knows every single one by name.
This remarkable, ancient parrot — flightless, nocturnal, and utterly unlike anything else — has been brought back from the very edge of extinction by one of the most intensive conservation efforts in history. When the Kākāpō Recovery Programme began in 1995, just 51 birds remained. Through decades of predator-free island sanctuaries, supplementary feeding, egg management, and round-the-clock monitoring, the population has slowly climbed to around 240 individuals.
And now, in 2026, the kākāpō are doing something extraordinary.
Kākāpō breed only when rimu trees produce a bumper crop of fruit — a rare event that happens every two to four years when the trees are triggered by unusual weather patterns. When the fruiting comes, it triggers something primal in the birds. Females nest. Eggs are laid. Chicks hatch.
This year, the rimu trees across all three kākāpō breeding islands — Whenua Hou, Pukenui, and Te Kāhaku — are fruiting at record levels: 50 to 60% coverage across every island simultaneously. Scientists have never seen anything like it.
As of early March 2026, 240 eggs have been laid — with almost every breeding-age female nesting. There are already 26 living chicks. The season is still underway.
Conservationists are cautiously calling this a potential turning point for the species. Not just because of the numbers — though adding dozens of individuals to a population of 240 is genuinely enormous — but because of what it suggests for the future. The goal for decades has been to create a large enough, genetically diverse enough population that kākāpō could eventually sustain themselves with reduced human intervention. A season like this gets them meaningfully closer.
The Kākāpō Recovery Programme is a collaboration between New Zealand's Department of Conservation (DOC), Ngāi Tahu (the local iwi, or Māori tribal group, who regard kākāpō as a taonga — a treasure), and partners including Meridian Energy. Every egg is monitored. Every chick is weighed. Some eggs are artificially incubated to protect them; others are managed in the nest with the mother.
The kākāpō is one of the world's oldest birds — individuals can live for 90 years or more. They evolved in a New Zealand that had no land mammals and no need to fly from predators. When humans arrived with rats, stoats, and possums, the kākāpō had no defences. They froze when danger approached. They were easy to catch.
They nearly didn't make it.
But they are still here. And right now, across three small islands in the far south of New Zealand, 26 new kākāpō chicks are navigating their first weeks of life — with a team of humans watching over every single one of them.
If that's not a conservation story worth celebrating, nothing is. 🦜