Deidre’s one rare bird!
DOC’S DEIDRE VERCOE (41) HAS WON A 2019 BLAKE AWARD FOR HER WORK – BUT THE BIGGER PRIZE LIES DEEP IN OUR ISLAND FORESTS
There are more ka¯ka¯po¯ alive today than there have been for more than 70 years. When I started working with the programme in 2002, we had 86 birds in total. This year alone, we hatched 86 chicks, and 72 of them are still with us. They’re all around 150 days old so we can start counting them as part of the official population. We just broke through 200 and could get up to 214!
Wherever you find ka¯ka¯po¯ and takahe¯, they’re looked after by a team based in Invercargill and Te Anau. Most of the time I’m sitting at a desk in Invercargill chasing emails, but I still do occasionally get to chase birds.
I made my first volunteer trip down to Whenua Hou (Codfish Island) in 1997 and that’s when I met my first ka¯ka¯po¯, Sirocco. He’s world-famous now but at that time he was a chick in the pen, probably around five months old, which is an amazing age for a ka¯ka¯po¯ because they’re like toddlers – curious and playful. I remember he leapt off my colleague Daryl Eason’s shoulder and straight into my arms! He was quite intimidating because he’s a big bird, but it was a pretty amazing encounter.
I spent two weeks that winter doing supplementary feeding. I remember thinking, ‘This is what I really want to do.’ I was 19 at the time. It was July, it was cold and it was eye-opening. For a start, it was hard work – I’d never done so much tramping and carrying heavy backpacks. That
was my first exposure doing that sort of stuff day in, day out in that sort of weather, but I was really inspired by the team.
I was a full-time island ranger for the first three years. That was an amazing period of my life. I met lots of interesting people and lived a fantastic life – totally isolated – on Whenua Hou and a couple of other islands in Fiordland.
This year has broken so many records, but we had the fungal infection Aspergillosis and that felt like a nightmare at times. We had seven birds die and another 13 infected. All but four have made great improvement and have either been released or are soon to be returned to their island. We feel like we’ve turned a very big corner and the worst is behind us.
I was pretty fond of a bird called Hoki, but she was one of two adult females who died of Aspergillosis. That was pretty hard. She had a lot of character – she was pretty feisty, actually, and people found her quite intimidating. She had been rearing three chicks at the time and was herself the first-ever hand-reared ka¯ka¯po¯. She was still young and supposed to outlive us all.
Aside from Sirocco, she was probably one of the first wild ka¯ka¯po¯ that I was introduced to. I remember quite a number of years ago she had a nest in a cavern underneath these big rocks and you had to crawl on your belly to get into it, exposing your legs out the back of the hole. Hers was the kind of nest you visited with a colleague so one person could distract her. You were always terrified that she was going to come home and start biting you on the calf.
I’ve had a few good bites from her on my fingers and hands. Ka¯ka¯po¯ can bite quite well!
Watching a ka¯ka¯po¯ hatch is pretty incredible and there were lots of opportunities for that this year because we hatched a lot of chicks in incubators. That’s always very special. Sometimes it can be a day or two from when they first start making their little pits in their shell, but once they start actually breaking out they can be born in 20 minutes.
My two daughters, Zadie (12) and Isla (8), have both lived around ka¯ka¯po¯ their whole lives. I don’t really know if they understand how rare the birds are. I think maybe when they’re older they’ll realise just how unique their situation has been.
This year, Isla helped me with the chicks being hand-reared in Invercargill – cutting vegetables and getting water for them – so that’s a really unique experience for a young girl.
To me, the most special encounters are usually in the middle of the night in the dark when you’re walking through the forest and come across a ka¯ka¯po¯. One night in April or May, I was walking home when I came across a group of four or five young males that had all congregated together in a few trees and were making such a racket – there was “scrarking” and yelling and still a bit of booming going on behind me – and it just kind of hit me that that’s actually what New Zealand bush is supposed to be like. It’s supposed to be full of this crazy noise, and it’s not. It was really special to have that and I felt I was witnessing something miraculous.
I feel privileged to have been here and to help lead an amazing team through this special time. It feels really humbling to have that ability, that trust of others, to do the best job we can. It’s still so precious – 200 is such a small number – and ka¯ka¯po¯ were so perilously close to extinction that it makes me determined to continue because we’ve still got such a long way to go.”