In a season already being called the largest in the documented history of the kākāpō recovery programme, Department of Conservation rangers have added one more chick to the official tally after tunnelling through the back wall of a precarious clifftop nest in Fiordland.
The chick belongs to a kākāpō named Rimu, who chose to lay her clutch on Te Kākahu, also known as Chalky Island, in a spot perched directly above a sixty metre drop. Her transmitter told rangers she was nesting, but the entrance was simply too dangerous to approach from the front, leaving DOC staff with no way to confirm whether there were eggs, chicks, or anything at all inside. For months Rimu’s nest stayed a quiet mystery in the middle of an otherwise busy breeding season.
That mystery has now been solved. DOC staff Petrus Hedman and Daryl Eason worked from the rear of the nest, slowly opening up the back wall until they could reach inside. Hedman described the moment of discovery to RNZ, saying he “fumbled around a little bit and struck something soft”. What he had touched was a single large, healthy chick. Once the chick was confirmed safe, rangers enlarged the rear entrance to give themselves a far safer route in for future checks, and they blocked off the original clifftop entry so neither Rimu nor any future ranger could fall.
With Rimu’s chick added to the books, the 2026 kākāpō breeding season has now produced 106 hatchings. Ninety three of those chicks are currently alive, with the rest lost over the course of the season, which is sadly normal for a recovering parrot population still being painstakingly nursed back from the edge. Until Rimu’s nest was opened, the official end of season count had been ninety two surviving chicks. The new arrival nudges the tally up by one and turns what was already a record breaking year into something a little more emphatic.
To grasp how significant a single chick is, it helps to look at the longer arc. Kākāpō recovery operations manager Deirdre Vercoe joined the programme in 2002, when the entire global population was just eighty four birds. Today there are two hundred and thirty five adult kākāpō spread across a small number of predator free island sanctuaries, with chicks not added to the formal population count until they reach 150 days old and full fledging. Almost every individual kākāpō in the country has a name, a transmitter, a bloodline file, and a small army of rangers, scientists and volunteers who track its movements, weigh its food, watch its mating displays, and every so often tunnel into the back of a cliff to make sure its baby is alright.
It is hard to think of another threatened species in the world managed with that level of intimacy, and the Te Kākahu rescue is a useful reminder of why the work matters. Kākāpō are flightless, nocturnal, and famously slow to breed. Females only nest in heavy rimu fruiting years, and when they do nest, they often choose hollows under root systems, in tree bases, or, as in Rimu’s case, in the kind of place a person would struggle to abseil into. Without active intervention the species would almost certainly already be gone, and every chick added to the count is a tangible return on decades of conservation funding, ranger labour, predator removal, and Ngāi Tahu involvement as kaitiaki.
Te Kākahu sits in southwestern Fiordland, deep inside the Te Wāhipounamu World Heritage Area, and is one of a handful of islands cleared of stoats, rats and cats so that kākāpō can be released without their chicks ending up as someone else’s dinner. Other key sanctuary islands include Whenua Hou near Stewart Island and Anchor Island in Dusky Sound. Each island holds a different chunk of the genetic backup of the species, which is why programme staff worry about every single egg.
The 2026 season has been notable not just for its size but for the way the population has finally pushed past the long running symbolic threshold of two hundred adult birds. The recovery has been slow, sometimes painfully so, but by any reasonable conservation measure it is working. The wider context for that progress is set out in DOC’s kākāpō recovery information, which describes the use of artificial insemination, supplementary feeding, careful disease management, and a national network of island sanctuaries to give the species somewhere safe to live.
For most New Zealanders the kākāpō is one of the easiest native species to feel a personal connection to. The birds are large, mossy green, almost comically charismatic, and one of them, Sirocco, became a global star after enthusiastically attempting to mate with a zoologist’s head on television in 2009. Stories like Rimu’s, where a single chick is rescued through patient ranger work in a remote corner of Fiordland, do not always make front page headlines, but they are exactly the kind of quiet, persistent good news that makes the broader conservation effort feel worth it.
Have you ever seen a kākāpō in the flesh, perhaps on a guided trip to one of the sanctuary islands, or do you have a favourite kākāpō recovery story of your own? Drop your thoughts and questions in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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