Bird of the year on endangered list
The plight of the kea has been formally recognised on the world stage after an international conservation organisation for the first time listed it as endangered.
The large, green mountain parrots are famed for their curiosity and intelligence and in October were voted New Zealand’s bird of the year.
But their future is in peril, with numbers once in the hundreds of thousands now dwindled to between just 3000 and 7000 birds.
They are already recognised as endangered in New Zealand, and 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 numbers are declining rapidly enough for it 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.
He said: ‘‘We just thought we had more birds and that they were doing reasonably well. Sadly that’s not the case.’’
A study of kea habitat across the South Island between 2009 and 2014 found only 2 per cent of nests were successful in producing birds that grew to adulthood.
That figure rose to 27 per cent after aerial application in 2015 of biodegradable 1080 poison pellets.
Kea also occasionally fall sick from lead poisoning, often chewing on nails and lead flashing in older houses because they like the taste.
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, that is not the problem.
‘‘The big problem is feeding them encourages them to try novel foods, so they then eat anything that looks like a novel food.
‘‘Those kea that are not interacting with people are much more conservative about what they eat, so when we use 1080 we don’t get any deaths.’’
In areas such as Arthur’s Pass and ski fields where people – particularly tourists – feed the birds, using 1080 to cull predators has the downside of killing kea curious enough to eat the poison.