South Canterbury Museum

Long-lost grey ghost of South Island forests

One of the more unusual birds on display in the South Canterbury Museum’s new birds case has long gone from our region, and may well be extinct.

This is the South Island ko¯ kako, an elegant grey crow-sized bird with blur and yellow wattles on either side of its beak. This forest dweller was once found around the South Island in forest habitat.

Bones from this bird have been found in laughing owl nest deposits in limestone cliff areas around South Canterbury. At the time these birds were alive, our local valleys were covered in a rich podocarp-broadleaf forest habitat, with dozens of bird species making their homes here.

The arrival of humans, dogs, rats and fire around 800 years ago changed the local environment, and forest dwellers like the kokako quickly disappeared. However, populations remained in forested areas of Marlborough, Nelson, Westland and Southland.

Captain Cook noted the amazing dawn bird chorus in the Marlborough Sounds in the 1760s, where the rich bell and flutelike tones of the ko¯ kako would have been especially noticeable. Naturalists aboard the Endeavour collected the first specimens to be taken back to Europe for scientific classification.

The ko¯ kako remained moderately common on the West Coast up until the beginning of the 20th century. Then it went into quick decline, no doubt due to the rapid spread of mammalian predators such as stoats.

By the 1970s it seemed to have disappeared, although trampers and explored reported hearing possible ko¯ kako calls in the years that followed.

We can only hope that this beautiful songster may yet survive, like the flightless takahe¯ , in a remote location, although the chances are not great.

Its close relative, the North Island ko¯ kako, has benefited from care and has a small but growing population.

The museum’s ko¯ kako specimen has no locality data, but is part of a Victorian bird collection, gathered during the 19th century when conservation concerns were not given much thought at all.

We don’t know what we’ve lost until it’s gone.