Chopper tour opens door to rare birds
A new tourism venture is giving people a way to see the country’s rarest forest bird up close in the wilderness.
Called Flight Path, the tours offer people the chance to take a pre-dawn helicopter ride from Christchurch and spend time with New Zealand’s rarest forest bird, the orangefronted parakeet/ka¯ ka¯ riki karaka.
The bird, with its unmistakable vibrant plumage, is the rarest of the country’s six species of parakeet.
About 300 of the parakeets remain in the wild, with most in the Hurunui South Branch in Lake Sumner Forest Park and the Hawdon and Poulter valleys in Arthur’s Pass National Park in Canterbury.
There is also a population on Blumine Island in the Marlborough Sounds.
The species was thought to have been extinct until 25 years ago.
The tours are a collaboration between luxury hotel The George, Christchurch Helicopters and the Department of Conservation (DOC), and are available to hotel guests by special arrangement.
Flight Path is the brainchild of Christchurch Helicopters’ owners and pilots, Terry Murdoch and former All Blacks captain Richie McCaw.
The pair were committed to raising funds to support efforts by DOC’s recovery team to bolster Canterbury’s parakeet population.
Projects include working with pestcontrol innovation, intensified monitoring and research, increased genetics to support optimal pairings, and breeding aviaries to reduce the stress on the birds who have to be translocated.
As part of the tours, DOC endangered species ranger Lyndon Slater would fly with guests to Lake Sumner Forest Park and show them the best spots in the valley, such as some natural hot pools.
After lift-off, guests would see the Canterbury Plains and farmland from above, along with the region’s braided rivers.
People would also have the chance to help out with some ranger activities such as checking and baiting traps. Slater would share details of the extensive conservation work being carried out to help the parakeets survive, and would serve a picnic lunch.
Also available was the opportunity to release an orange-fronted parakeet into the forest. Eighteen of the birds were released into the wild after the coronavirus restrictions were eased under alert level 3.
They joined another 15 that were released in the area in March following a booming breeding season.