- New Zealand’s Department of Conservation added 90 chicks from the 2026 breeding season to the official tally on Sept. 1, taking the population to 325 birds.
- Ninety chicks in a single season is a record; in the early years of the recovery programme it took 16 years to produce that many.
- Modelling suggests the next breeding season could come as soon as 2028, after a four-year gap this time round.
The kakapo, a flightless parrot that was down to 51 birds in 1995, has reached 325 after a record breeding season, the highest count in roughly three-quarters of a century.
Kakapo are heavy, nocturnal, flightless parrots found only in New Zealand, and they came within a few dozen birds of disappearing.
The Department of Conservation’s Kakapo Recovery Programme began in 1995 with 51 birds, only 20 of them female. Across 13 breeding seasons it has worked around the problems that come with a gene pool that small, including infertility and poor hatching success.
Chicks are only added to the official count once the youngest survivor reaches 150 days, the point at which they have fledged and are considered independent, which happened on Sept. 1.
“We had a four-year gap between breeding seasons, so it’s fantastic to finally see the population increase after all that time,” said Deidre Vercoe, the program’s operations manager.
“It’s also a significant milestone for the species, as the last time the population is thought to have exceeded 300 birds may have been as long as 75 years ago,” she said.
The program is run jointly with Ngāi Tahu, and this season it deliberately did less. Rangers cut back on egg and chick checks, leaning on data from remote nest cameras instead, and reduced supplementary feeding.
“Our focus is increasingly on determining where intensive intervention is still needed and where we can start to return to more natural levels of kākāpō breeding outcomes,” said Tāne Davis, the Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu representative on the Kakapo Recovery Group.
Most of this year’s chicks will be named on the anniversary of their hatch days next February and March. A small number will not be named at all, the first unnamed kakapo in modern recovery history, marking the shift toward letting them be wild birds again.
Davis has his sights on making their ancestral home safe enough for them to return to.
“All but one of the founders of the modern population came from Rakiura, so seeing their ancestral home become safe for them to one day return remains a key aspiration,” he said.
“There is still a long road of recovery ahead, but ninety chicks in a single season is a record,” Vercoe said.
