In a forest in New Zealand, something extraordinary is happening right now. The fat green parrots are active. The males have spent months hollowing out depressions in the soil, inflating throat sacs, and booming through the night — a sound, low enough to travel kilometres, designed to attract a mate. The females have been eating. A lot. Fattening on the rimu fruit that falls only in abundance every few years, storing the energy they will need.
The eggs are coming. All 84 breeding-age females are expected to lay.
For the kākāpō (*Strigops habroptilus*), this is the best conditions for a breeding year in nearly half a century.
**The Bird That Shouldn't Still Exist**
The kākāpō is singular. It is the world's heaviest parrot — adults can reach 4 kilograms. It is the only parrot that is completely flightless. It is nocturnal. It is extraordinarily long-lived — individuals can reach 90 years or more. It has a pleasant, mossy smell that, unfortunately for its survival prospects, can be detected by predators from some distance.
For millions of years, it evolved in a New Zealand that had no land mammals. No foxes. No rats. No stoats. In that world, its defensive strategy — to freeze and rely on camouflage — worked well enough.
Then humans arrived. First Māori, approximately 1000 years ago, bringing the Polynesian rat (*kiore*). Then Europeans, in the 18th and 19th centuries, bringing cats, dogs, stoats, and weasels. Within centuries, the kākāpō — which breeds slowly, which incubates eggs on the ground, which freezes in the face of predators rather than fleeing — was being wiped out across New Zealand.
By 1977, when organised conservation efforts began, there were thought to be just 18 individuals left. All male. The species appeared functionally extinct.
**The Recovery That Took Decades**
The New Zealand Department of Conservation launched the Kākāpō Recovery Programme in 1995, though intensive conservation work had begun years earlier. The strategy involved moving all surviving kākāpō to predator-free islands — Codfish Island (Whenua Hou), Anchor Island, and Little Barrier Island (Hauturu) — where stoats, rats, and cats could be controlled or eliminated.
Female birds were eventually found — on Fiordland's remote Sinbad Gully, later on Stewart Island. Genetic diversity, which had been severely depleted, was carefully managed. Every single bird received an individual name, a transponder, a file. Every breeding attempt was monitored, often manually assisted. Chicks that failed to thrive were supplementary fed. Genetic parentage was tracked.
It is one of the most intensive species recovery programmes ever conducted. And it has worked — slowly, painstakingly, year by year.
From 18 known individuals in 1977, the population reached 50 by 2005. By 2019, it had climbed to 147 — the highest recorded since the programme began. The 2022 breeding season produced 57 fledged chicks, pushing the population to over 200. Today there are **237 kākāpō**.
**Why 2026 Is Special: The Rimu Connection**
Kākāpō don't breed every year. Breeding is triggered by food abundance — specifically, by the mass fruiting of the rimu tree (*Dacrydium cupressinum*), a native New Zealand conifer. Rimu trees fruit heavily only every two to five years, and kākāpō have evolved to synchronise their breeding with these mast events.
In 2025, rangers monitoring the breeding islands observed exceptionally high rimu fruit loads — approximately 50–60% of rimu trees across the breeding islands were producing fruit. That is an extraordinary abundance.
Female kākāpō, sensing the abundance, began eating heavily in December 2025. Mating activity — the males' booming and bowl-building behaviour — began the same month. The females are now, in March 2026, in the process of laying eggs.
Scientists from the University of Auckland and the Department of Conservation project that all 84 breeding-age females could lay eggs this season — something that has never happened before in the programme's recorded history. The team is predicting a potential record number of chicks, with fledglings expected to be independent by September or October 2026.
**The People Behind It**
The Kākāpō Recovery Programme is a remarkable human story as well as a conservation one. Rangers live for extended periods on isolated offshore islands, monitoring individual birds, replacing failed eggs with dummy eggs during genetic pairing, supplementary feeding underweight chicks through the night.
The birds have accumulated fans worldwide. The population is small enough that each individual is known: there's Richard Henry — named after the 19th century conservationist who first moved kākāpō to Fiordland — who at over 50 years old may be the oldest living kākāpō. There's Sirocco, New Zealand's official Spokesbird for Conservation. Each one matters, individually and as part of the population.
That personal investment — from the programme's staff, from tens of thousands of supporters worldwide, from Ngāi Tahu, the Māori iwi with customary connections to the species — has sustained nearly five decades of recovery effort.
**237 and Counting**
The kākāpō is not yet safe. 237 individuals is still an extremely small population. The loss of genetic diversity from the historic bottleneck remains a challenge. The dependence on predator-free islands is a constraint on how large the population can grow.
But 237 is not 18. And after this season, 237 could become something considerably larger.
In the forests of Codfish Island and Anchor Island, 84 fat green parrots are sitting on their nests. Rangers are watching over them through the night. The rimu fruit is on the ground.
Something is being brought back from the edge. 🦜🌿
*Sources: New Zealand Department of Conservation · University of Auckland · Kākāpō Recovery Programme · RNZ (Radio New Zealand) · The Guardian · LiveScience · Xinhua / english.news.cn*
