Kea numbers move into the red
The plight of the kea has been formally recognised on the world stage after an international conservation organisation for the first time listed the native bird as being endangered.
The large, green mountain parrots are famed for their curiosity and intelligence. In October, the species was voted New Zealand’s bird of the year.
But the kea’s future is in peril, with numbers once in the hundreds of thousands now dwindled to between just 3000 and 7000 birds.
Already recognised as endangered in New Zealand, that status has been officially ratified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the world’s most comprehensive inventory of threatened species.
The red list upgraded the kea’s status from vulnerable following new information that showed their numbers were declining rapidly enough for the species to be considered endangered.
Every year, 60 per cent of kea nests are devastated by predators such as stoats, rats and possums, according to conservation organisation BirdLife – a figure that can rise to 99 per cent during a stoat ‘‘plague’’.
Poison baits are used to control introduced mammals and have been shown to significantly improve the success of kea nesting.
But the method cannot be used fully across kea habitats because of the risk of some birds eating them.
Kevin Hackwell, chief conservation adviser at Forest & Bird, said the listing was a ‘‘wake-up call’’ to take action, with predator control and people not feeding kea being paramount.
A study of kea habitats across the South Island between 2009 and 2014 found only 2 per cent of their nests were successful in producing birds that grew to adulthood.
That figure rose to 27 per cent after a 2015 aerial application of biodegradable 1080 poison pellets.
But perhaps the greatest conservation challenge was in stopping people feeding kea, Hackwell said: ‘‘It is not just that the food might be dangerous to them ... feeding them encourages them to try novel foods, so they then eat anything that looks like a novel food.’’
In areas such as Arthur’s Pass and skifields where people fed the birds, success with using 1080 to cull predators had the downside of killing kea that had grown curious enough to eat the poison.
But while the trend was of a general decline in kea numbers, their fate was far from sealed.
‘‘Despite the fact that we have had to upgrade (the threat), we have the ability to reverse it,’’ Hackwell said.
‘‘If we can just stop people feeding kea, that will make a big difference.’’
Though almost 700 of the world’s bird species are now classed as endangered or critically endangered, it is not all doom and gloom.
Two species of kiwi have recovered to the point of no longer being endangered after a 30-year programme to stabilise their numbers.