Imagine not having chicks for 23 years? That’s the story of Jean the kākāpō. And she’s had a colourful life. She was found in 1981 on Stewart Island, on a place called ‘Heidi Ridge’, and moved to Maud Island for a year, before being shifted to Little Barrier Island alongside seventeen other birds to save them from predation by feral cats. After that, she promptly disappeared for ten years until she was rediscovered in 1992 sitting on a clutch of eggs. Unfortunately, they were infertile — but she

The last female kākāpō found on Stewart Island passed away this week. Solstice, the female kākāpō, died in Dunedin after being hospitalised for several months with cloacitis, sometimes called “crusty bum”, a disease that, unfortunately, has claimed a number of kākāpō over the years. Solstice’s story is one that’s close to me, because she was the first kākāpō we ever wrote about for New Zealand Conservation Stories back in 2020. She was discovered in 1997 on Stewart Island, four years after the l

How long does a kākāpō live? The honest answer is: we still don’t know. Kākāpō are among the world’s longest-lived birds, and several individuals alive today were already adults when researchers first began banding and monitoring the species in the 1970s. Because of that, no kākāpō of known age has reached the end of its natural lifespan yet. What we can say, based on what we’ve observed so far, is that some living birds are well over 50 years old, and that’s only the minimum we can confirm. Ini

Male kākāpō booming | Large forest birds | Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand