A rare success story; Into the wild

Simon Barnes
28 February 2009
The Times
(c) 2009 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved

They've found a new kakapo. Can you believe it? Or, rather, they have found an old one, one that they hadn't heard from in years. It just popped up last week.

Extraordinary. It was released in 1987 and then it vanished. Now it has decided to make itself known again, bringing the world's population up to a brave 91.

"The kakapo is a bird out of time," Douglas Adams wrote in Last Chance to See in 1990. "If you look on its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though you know it probably will not be." But it's still there.

Against all the odds, it clings to existence: one of the most astonishing, the most utterly bizarre creatures still walking on the surface of the Earth. Not flying above its surface; kakapos gave up that sort of malarkey millions of years ago.

The temptation to see the kakapo as an emblem of lost innocence is almost overwhelming. It looks like a toy invented by a strange and troubled eccentric.

Every aspect of its lifestyle seems to imply faith in things no longer valid, such as the essentially benign nature of the planet it lives on. Thus the bird becomes simultaneously a rebuke to the human destroyers of innocence and a condemnation of Nature — Nature that's a little too vague, a little too woolly, a little too slow for the 21st century.

But let us take human beings out of the equation. Let us celebrate a bird adapted strangely but perfectly for a time of spaciousness and generosity, a bird that made the most out of New Zealand's tectonic break with Gondwana 82 million years ago. As a result of this break New Zealand became the country of the birds, a land where no mammals trod the earth. They trod the air; bats came. But this was a place where the blind forces of evolution were able to indulge in a little fantasy with birds.

Perhaps the rummest thing that they came up with was the kakapo — a big, fat, chunky, hard-walking, treeclimbing, nocturnal parrot. The nearest it gets to flying is to parachute out of trees.

Everything it does is easy, leisured, unurgent. This is a bird that approaches life with the certainty that it has all the time in the world. Its basic strategy is to live for a long time — 60 years is not exceptional. If you follow the evolutionary logic that all any bird has to do to fulfil its biological destiny is to produce a single, breeding offspring, its lifestyle makes excellent sense. The birds live scattered lives, seldom coming together. They have adapted for a life in the best of New Zealand's wild wet habitats, places that, in the times when its only mammals flew, occasionally echoed to the apologetic boom of the male kakapo in its rare amorous moods. (Google "kakapo boom" to hear it.)

The kakapo lived in a kind of Edwardian idyll lasting countless millennia, in the long ages before the trouble came, time when there was honey still for tea and no one doubted the certainties that governed the rhythms of daily life.

Then everything changed, and did so overnight. But it wasn't that kakapos were adapted to the wrong values; rather, the wrong values were imposed on the kakapos, on New Zealand, on the world. You can no more blame the kakapos for being out of date that you can blame the indigenous inhabitants of lands across the world for being out of date when the Europeans arrived. In each case it was a violent and irreversible invasion.

In came the mammals: human beings, cats, rats, stoats. Fat, ground-dwelling birds had no chance. It wasn't that kakapos hadn't evolved properly, rather that the rules of the game had been changed and millions of years of evolution had been nullified. What happened to the dinosaurs when the meteor struck happened to the kakapos when the humans arrived.

So far, this is not a remarkable tale. It has happened all over the world, in different ways, with different creatures, many of which are no longer endangered. They escaped that destiny by becoming extinct.

But there is a remarkable tale to tell about the kakapo, and that is that there are still 91 of them, counting the resurgent boomer. That they keep going is a testament to human will. There is no hope left for the kakapo on New Zealand's main islands, but on the little ones things can be done.

In places small enough for control, places such as Codfish and Anchor Islands, four-footed mammalian predators have been wiped out and kakapos have made something of a comeback, helped by reintroductions and vigilance. That they have done so comes by way of considerable expense of time and money. The New Zealand Government, organisations such as Birdlife International, local organisations and impressive individuals on the ground believe that saving the kakapo is one of the vital duties of humankind.

The kakapo can now only ever be a fringe player, a creature of the margins, an avian benefit-junkie. Not the bird's fault; we have twisted and changed the world too much, that's all. But it's very clear that we don't want to lose the kakapo. Perhaps that's because its vast problems are so obviously our own fault. We seem to have a soul-deep urge to tell the big, daft, round-faced, parachuting, booming, very-occasionally-actually-breeding, somehow-stillsurviving, natural-born eccentric of the bird world that everything will be all right. It's as important for us as it is for the kakapo. We need to be told that we aren't going to destroy everything that matters, even if we suspect that we probably will.