Conservationists working to save the kea want councils to step in with bylaws that stop people feeding the endangered alpine parrot, warning that a handful of well meaning locals are turning one of New Zealand’s smartest birds into roadkill.
The Kea Conservation Trust is asking the Selwyn District Council to bring in a bylaw banning the feeding of kea at Arthur’s Pass, the small alpine village on State Highway 73 where the birds gather around cars, car parks and rubbish bins. Trust member Rene Habluetzel, who used to work at the Arthur’s Pass Café, told RNZ’s Checkpoint that the problem is not the steady stream of overseas tourists, but New Zealanders who think they are doing the birds a favour.
Once kea learn that people mean an easy feed, they stop foraging for the alpine plants, roots and insects that should make up their diet, and they linger near roads where they are struck and killed by passing vehicles. “If they’re eating our food, which is pretty high calorie, they’re not foraging for their own food out in the hills,” Habluetzel said. Staff and locals at the pass have repeatedly had to scrape dead birds off the road.
The trust says it has been dealing with one persistent feeder in the village for six years and has run out of options under the current law. The Wildlife Act makes it an offence to harm a protected species, but it was never written with the slow harm of a bag of chips in mind, and it gives the village no practical way to make a determined feeder stop. “A bylaw would help us with the recurrence of a persistent kea feeder in our village,” Habluetzel said. A council rule, unlike the national Act, could be enforced locally with fines and a clear line that everyone in the village understands.
Habluetzel put much of the blame on patchy public education rather than malice. Many people simply do not know that sharing their lunch with a curious bird at a lookout is one of the surest ways to shorten its life. The kea’s habit of hopping onto a wing mirror or unzipping a backpack makes it almost irresistible to a visitor with a camera, and that charm is exactly what gets the birds into trouble.
The appeal to local government comes against a grim backdrop. Fewer than 7,000 kea are thought to remain in the wild, and the species is listed as Threatened – Nationally Endangered, the second highest threat ranking New Zealand uses. The bird that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands was hunted under a government bounty for most of the twentieth century, a scheme that is estimated to have killed around 150,000 kea before it finally ended in 1971. The population has never recovered.
The threats that remain are stubborn. According to the Department of Conservation, about 60 percent of kea nests fail, mainly because stoats, possums and feral cats raid the ground level hollows where the birds breed. Lead poisoning is another quiet killer, as kea chew on the sweet tasting lead nails, flashings and head bolts of old high country huts and farm buildings, slowly destroying the very intelligence that makes them so remarkable. The Kea Conservation Trust now spends part of its time stripping lead from private dwellings across the South Island.
That intelligence is worth dwelling on. A University of Auckland study found that kea could weigh up statistical odds and read social cues in a way previously seen only in great apes, and researchers have compared their problem solving to that of a four year old child. They open bins, work latches and cooperate to get at food, which is precisely why a feeding habit is so hard to break once it takes hold.
The Arthur’s Pass appeal lands only days after a separate reminder of how badly human conflict can end for the birds. On 4 June the Department of Conservation revealed that a juvenile kea had been shot in the wing at Motupipi near Tākaka, in Golden Bay, and had to be put down because the injury could not be repaired. It was the second shooting in the area, and it followed a February case in which another kea was hit with a lead bullet and treated at Massey University’s Wildbase Hospital.
Tākaka biodiversity ranger Luke Easton said the goal was for people and kea to share the landscape rather than clash over it. “We don’t want to see conflict between kea and people like what has happened here,” he said. As kea numbers slowly climb in parts of Golden Bay, Easton urged residents to remove lead, pack away anything loose and make their properties dull to a passing parrot, especially “during their most active times like dawn and dusk”. A boring backyard, he suggested, is a safe backyard, because a kea that finds nothing to chew or steal soon heads back to the bush.
Both stories point the same way. The work of trapping predators and clearing lead from huts is being undone, bird by bird, by everyday human behaviour, whether that is a sandwich handed out at a lookout or a rifle pointed at a roof. The national Kea Recovery Strategy, the ten year plan written by DOC, Ngāi Tahu and the Kea Conservation Trust to lift the species out of danger by 2034, names exactly this kind of conflict as one of the hardest threats to fix, because it depends on changing what people do rather than what predators do.
For the conservationists at Arthur’s Pass, a council bylaw is a modest ask with an outsized payoff. It would not cost a predator trapping budget or a research grant. It would simply give a village a way to tell its most stubborn residents, gently and then firmly, to stop loving the kea to death.
Have you watched kea at Arthur’s Pass or in the high country, and should councils be able to fine people who feed them? Share your view 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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