Conservation teams have vaccinated about 90 kākāpā against bird flu, a precaution taken in the same week that the virus was confirmed in New Zealand for the first time. The Department of Conservation says it is the first time anywhere in the world that a critically endangered species has been vaccinated against the disease before the virus reached its home country.
The kākāpā is one of the rarest parrots on the planet, a flightless, nocturnal bird that now survives on a handful of predator-free islands off the south of the country. Roughly 70 of the birds live on Whenua Hou, also known as Codfish Island, near Stewart Island, with a further 20 or so on Pukunui, or Anchor Island, in Fiordland. Rangers have been catching the birds by hand, giving each one two injections spaced three to five weeks apart so their immune systems have time to build full protection before spring.
The push comes after a brown skua found on Petone Beach near Wellington tested positive for the H5 strain of bird flu, the first case detected in New Zealand. A second bird, a kāhu or swamp harrier in the Wairarapa, was confirmed to have the virus soon after. There have been no detections in poultry, and food safety authorities say chicken and eggs remain safe to eat.
New Zealand had been one of the last places on Earth untouched by the strain, which has swept through wild bird populations and poultry flocks across every other continent over the past few years. Australia recorded its first cases earlier in 2026, and biosecurity officials had warned it was only a matter of time before infected migratory birds carried it across the Tasman. The Ministry for Primary Industries says the newly arrived strain is likely to take hold and could become established within months.
For a bird as rare as the kākāpā, that prospect is alarming. A single outbreak on one of the islands could wipe out a large share of the population. That is why the Department of Conservation moved early, drawing on a world-first research trial completed last year that tested the vaccine on five native species and found it both safe and effective. Lydia Udstrom, a kākāpā vet with the department, said the timing was what set the effort apart. “It was a world first doing this in advance of the virus itself arriving in the country,” she said.
The kākāpā are part of a wider programme to protect about 300 core breeding birds across five of the country’s most threatened species. Alongside the kākāpā, the department is vaccinating takāhe, the kākāriki karaka or orange-fronted parakeet, the tūturuatu or shore plover, and kakī, the black stilt. These are birds that exist in tiny numbers and are held either in captivity or on offshore islands, where they can be caught and given the full course of injections. The department has been clear that vaccinating wild populations at large is not practical, so the focus is on the small, closely managed groups that carry the future of each species.
Dr Kate McInnes, a senior science advisor and wildlife vet at the department, said the country was in an unusual position to act before the worst arrived. “We’re in a unique position to be able to vaccinate some of our most vulnerable birds as a precaution before H5N1 bird flu potentially arrives here,” she said when the programme was announced.
The vaccination drive lands in the middle of a remarkable year for the kākāpā. The 2026 breeding season was the biggest on record, producing 90 living chicks and lifting the total population to 236, the first increase in four years. Ranger Louise Porter put the scale of that in perspective. “For context, it took 16 years from the start of the kākāpā recovery programme to produce 90 chicks,” she said. “This year, we’ve done that in one breeding season.” The new chicks are being vaccinated too, so that the gains of a record year are not undone by a virus arriving on the wind.
The recovery of the kākāpā has been one of the country’s longest running conservation stories. In the mid 1990s the species had fallen to around 50 birds, and every chick since has been tracked, weighed and nursed through the hazards of island life. Supplementary feeding, careful genetic management and the removal of predators from a small number of islands have slowly pulled the numbers up. A bird flu outbreak would be a threat of a different kind, one that could not be trapped or fenced out, which is what has made the vaccine such an appealing line of defence.
There is no guarantee the injections will hold off every risk. The vaccine reduces the chance of severe illness and death rather than making the birds immune, and the department has said it plans to leave a small number of kākāpā unvaccinated so it can compare how the two groups fare if the virus does reach the islands. That decision reflects how little is still known about how H5N1 will behave in New Zealand’s unique bird life, much of which evolved for millions of years without the diseases that shaped birds elsewhere.
For now, the work on Whenua Hou and Pukunui represents a rare chance to get ahead of a threat rather than react to it. Conservation staff have spent decades bringing the kākāpā back from the edge, and this season handed them both their best breeding result in memory and a fresh danger to guard against. Vaccinating the birds before the virus finds them is their attempt to protect both at once.
You can read the original reporting from RNZ, the Department of Conservation’s announcement of the vaccination programme, and 1News on the first confirmed case in New Zealand.
What do you make of the decision to vaccinate our rarest birds ahead of the virus? Share your thoughts 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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