James and the giant parrot

by James Mair for South Pacific island giants, 13 December 2007

The kakapo may just look like an enormous budgie, but it smells like sweet meadows. James Mair travels to Codfish island to sniff one out.

Getting to Codfish Island is like visiting Alcatraz. I’d never experienced a beach landing before and the pilot had to do a safety sweep to check the ‘runway’ for driftwood, penguins and sea lions before we could touch down.

We’d landed at Sealer’s Bay, home to scientist Ron Moorhouse and his small team. Ron told us that, at 9pm, as twilight faded, the nocturnal animal we’d come to see would come and find us. And it did.

From beneath the floorboards of the hut where we were staying, we heard a shriek. The forest here is a noisy place at night. Little blue penguins make horrendous sounds (like screaming babies) as they toddle amongst the trees, but the high pitched sound like tyres screeching over Tarmac was unmistakeably the call of a kakapo.

By the time I got outside a giant green flightless parrot was sitting on the veranda with a couple of scientists, allowing Ron to tickle him on the neck. His name was Sirocco and as I approached he accepted me into the group.

A giant green budgie

Sirocco looked exactly like a green budgie except his body was the size of a terrier, his elephant-grey feet as large as a grown man’s hands. The vivid green feathers on his body camouflaged him against the backdrop of the forest. The feathers on his face were delicate and furry, like rodent whiskers.

They smell like sweet, flowery summer meadows.

James Mair

For a parrot, the kakapo’s face looks remarkably like a guinea-pig’s. Even weirder, they smell like sweet, flowery summer meadows. Most animals are relatively odourless but in pre-human New Zealand, where there were no terrestrial predators. It didn’t matter if the kakapos had a fragrance as there was nothing to sniff them out.

One thing about Sirocco made him different. While scientists rarely see most of the kakapos on Codfish, Sirocco had been hand-raised. His interaction with humans meant that he had become imprinted on (effectively obsessed with) humans as a chick.

In the mood for love

Sirocco in the mood for love

We were on Codfish at the beginning of the breeding season and Sirocco was in the mood for love. This meant trouble for us visitors. As a result of his upbringing, Sirocco tries to mate with humans and in the breeding season he gets notoriously out of control.

One night, getting to the toilet that lay down a track passing through Sirocco’s territory took me 45 minutes - unhooking his claws from my wellies, manoeuvring free from his beak when it clamped on my knee cap, grimacing and treading carefully to avoid a kakapo casualty.

A delicate balance

Sirocco is only one of 86 kakapos left in the world.

The survival of these birds hangs in a delicate balance. The utmost care is taken to ensure no predators or diseases reach them. Before being allowed on to Codfish Island we had to pass through quarantine where the mud was removed from our boots, the burrs picked from our Velcro and our clothes removed and replaced with fresh ones for the flight. Today kakapos only survive in two well guarded nature reserves, here and on Anchor Island in Fiordland.

A bird in the bush

One night, pottering about, I heard a rustle in the bushes across from the hut. Probably Sirocco prowling around looking for a bit of attention, I thought. Then I realised that I could hear Sirocco calling from up near the toilet. Whatever was in the bushes wasn’t him.

Kakapo in a tree

I’d learned how to use the tracking devices that Ron and the team used to locate the kakapos in the field so I grabbed one and pointed it at the scrub. Using my novice tracking skills I worked out that the thing in the bushes was Poura, an immature female who had been hand-reared but was in the process of re-establishing herself in the wild.

I woke some of the islanders, exited that a male and female kakapo were within 15 metres of one another. Could there be a chance of them mating?

Sadly not. Sirocco is so strongly imprinted on humans that he just isn’t interested in other kakapos. That night, there would be no chance of the planet seeing in its 87th kakapo.

How to tickle a kakapo

As I walked back to my tent I saw a shape move in the undergrowth. I stopped to see Poura peering at me inquisitively. She was smaller than Sirocco and her temperament much calmer.

As she looked out at me I could tell that her hand-rearing was telling her to come over and say hello while, at the same time, her nature was saying she shouldn’t. I stood still, slowly crouched and held out my hand. She approached warily, eventually stopping inches away from me. Gently, I leaned over and tickled her mouth.

The kakapo scientists had taught me this relaxation technique. It mimicked the action that hand-reared kakapo become used to when being fed by humans. All the hand-reared kakapos still seemed to react to this, even as semi-wild adults. It induced an expression of comfort in Poura’s eyes, like the face a dog makes when you hit that magic spot behind its ear.

Making friends with a kakapo

So there I sat, on the ground in the forest on a government controlled island reserve, with my toothbrush in one hand, my head-torch round my neck and a kakapo - rescued from the brink of extinction - at my fingertips.

When stroking an animal which is one of only 86 in the world, the apparently simple situation – effortless though it is – feels surprisingly complicated. I find stroking a dog a simple pleasure. Stroking a kakapo on the other hand, considering their history and their future, was mind-blowing.

The rare kakapo has been given such high level government protection that visiting Codfish Island is a rare opportunity.

Many of the islands in the South Pacific are inaccessible, mainly because of the vast distances between them. Huw Cordey visited one of the tiny Torres Islands to the north of New Zealand to film another giant for TV series South Pacific, a crab so big that its pincers can carve up coconuts.