World News
The kakapo count reaches 325 after ninety chicks are added
By Staff Writer | 3 September 2026
New Zealand's conservation department added ninety chicks from the 2026 season to the official tally on 1 September, taking the population of the flightless parrot to 325. The last time it is thought to have passed 300 may be 75 years ago.
The official population of the kakapo, the flightless parrot of New Zealand, reached 325 birds on 1 September, when ninety chicks from the 2026 breeding season were added to the tally. Chicks join the count once the youngest surviving bird reaches 150 days, the age at which they have fledged and are treated as independent enough to be counted.
The recovery programme began in 1995 with 51 birds, of which 20 were female. Thirteen breeding seasons have followed. Ninety chicks in one of them is the highest number the modern programme has produced, and the operations manager, Deidre Vercoe, said the season followed a four year gap in which there was no breeding at all.
There is still a long road of recovery ahead, but ninety chicks in a single season is a record. In the early years of recovery, it took 16 years to produce that many chicks.
Deidre Vercoe, Kakapo Recovery Operations Manager, New Zealand Department of Conservation
The department says the last time the population is thought to have exceeded 300 birds may be as long as 75 years ago. That is a hedged statement on its own release and it is left hedged here.
The season that tried doing less
The programme also used the season to test how much of its own handling it could withdraw. It ran fewer egg and chick checks, relying instead on data from remote nest monitoring, and cut back supplementary feeding. Tane Davis, who represents Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu on the recovery group, said the measure of a season is not only the number.
His account of it was that the focus now is on working out where intensive intervention is still needed and where the programme can begin returning to more natural breeding outcomes. A small number of this year's chicks will not be given names at all, which the department calls the first unnamed birds of the modern recovery period and treats as a marker of the same shift.
Three islands and a transmitter each
There are three breeding populations: on Whenua Hou, also called Codfish Island, near Rakiura, and on Pukenui and Te Kahaku, known as Anchor Island and Chalky Island, in Fiordland. Every bird carries a small radio transmitter that tracks where it is and how active it has been. The recovery group has said it wants Rakiura itself made free of introduced predators, because all but one of the founders of the modern population came from there and the island is where a self sustaining population would have to live.
The department's modelling points to the next breeding season falling in 2028, a two year gap rather than the four that preceded this one. Nothing about the species makes that certain, and the release states it as modelling.
Three hundred and twenty five birds on three islands is not a secure population. What has changed is that the number is now large enough for the people running the programme to argue about how much of it to leave alone, which is an argument they could not have had at 51.