The Kakapo: New Zealand’s Nocturnal, Flightless Parrot — and Its Return From the Brink

On 1 September 2026, New Zealand’s Department of Conservation added ninety chicks to the official kakapo tally and the population reached 325 birds — the highest it has been in around seventy-five years.

That number is worth sitting with. In 1995 there were fifty-one kakapo left alive, and only twenty of them were female. The species had been written off more than once. Ninety chicks in a single season is a record; in the early years of the recovery programme it took sixteen years to produce that many.

The kakapo (Strigops habroptilus) is the world’s only flightless parrot, the heaviest parrot alive, the only parrot that breeds in leks, and one of the longest-lived birds known. It is also, by some distance, one of the most intensively managed wild animals on Earth. Every living individual has a name, a transmitter, and a sequenced genome.

What is the kakapo?

The kakapo — properly kākāpō in Māori, meaning “night parrot” — is a large, moss-green, nocturnal, flightless parrot endemic to New Zealand.

It is the sole member of its genus, Strigops. Its closest living relatives are New Zealand’s other endemic parrots, the kea and the kākā, from which it split tens of millions of years ago — long enough that the kakapo represents an ancient and isolated branch of the parrot family tree.

Its plumage is mottled moss-green, yellow and black, which is close to perfect camouflage against a forest floor of moss and leaf litter. It has an owl-like facial disc of fine feathers around forward-set eyes, and stiff whisker-like feathers around the bill, thought to help it sense the ground as it walks in the dark.

It also has a distinctive musty-sweet smell, often compared to old violin cases or honey. Among kakapo, that scent probably helps birds find one another across dark forest. Against mammals that hunt by nose, it is a liability.

Why can’t the kakapo fly?

New Zealand spent roughly eighty million years without land mammals. In that world, the pressures that keep most birds airborne simply were not there, and several New Zealand lineages became flightless — the moa, the kiwi, the takahē and the kakapo among them.

The kakapo did not lose its wings. It has short, rounded ones that are useless for powered flight but genuinely useful for balance, and for slowing a descent. A kakapo will climb high into a rimu tree and then parachute down, wings spread, landing with a heavy thump.

What it lost is the keel — the deep breastbone that anchors flight muscles in flying birds. Without it there is nothing to power a wingbeat. Instead the kakapo invested in strong legs and a powerful grip, and became an excellent climber and a tireless walker. Individuals have been tracked covering several kilometres in a night.

The strategy worked for eighty million years. It stopped working in the space of a few centuries.

Where do kakapo live?

Nowhere that is not actively defended.

There is no wild, self-sustaining kakapo population anywhere. Every living bird is on an island or in a fenced sanctuary from which mammalian predators have been removed and are kept out:

• Whenua Hou / Codfish Island, off Rakiura (Stewart Island) — the largest population and the centre of the breeding programme
• Pukenui / Anchor Island, in Dusky Sound, Fiordland
• Chalky Island, also in Fiordland
• Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari, Waikato — a fenced mainland reserve ringed by 47 km of pest-proof fence, where kakapo were returned to the North Island mainland in July 2023 for the first time in well over a century

Historically the kakapo ranged across all three main islands of New Zealand, from coastal scrub to subalpine tussock. That range is gone. What is left is a managed network, and the 2023 move to Maungatautari matters precisely because it tests whether kakapo can live somewhere reachable by road — a question the species’ long-term future depends on, since there are only so many remote predator-free islands.

How many kakapo are left?

325, as of the official count on 1 September 2026.

The trajectory is worth laying out, because it explains why every chick is news:

Chicks are only added to the official tally once the youngest surviving chick reaches 150 days, the point at which young kakapo have fledged and are considered independent. That is why a bumper breeding season in early 2026 became an official number only in September.

The strangest breeding system of any parrot

The kakapo is the only parrot in the world that breeds in leks, and its breeding is tied to a single tree.

The rimu mast

Kakapo do not breed annually. The only reliable trigger is the mast — the mass fruiting — of the rimu tree, which happens roughly once every two to four years. In a mast year there is enough fruit to raise chicks. In other years, the birds largely do not try.

This is why kakapo recovery moves in jumps rather than a steady climb, and why a four-year wait preceded the record 2026 season. Conservation staff now monitor rimu fruiting to forecast breeding seasons, in some cases more than a year ahead.

Track and bowl

In the months before a mast, males climb to ridgelines and prepare track-and-bowl systems — networks of cleared trails linking shallow bowl-shaped depressions dug into the ground. The bowls are positioned against rock faces or banks that act as natural amplifiers.

From these bowls the male booms: a deep, low-frequency call, repeated for hours, night after night, for weeks or months. Low frequencies carry, and a booming male can be heard several kilometres away. Between bouts he chings, a higher metallic note that helps a female pinpoint him once she is close.

A male may boom through most of a night and lose a substantial share of his body weight over a season. Females walk in from across the island, sometimes for kilometres, choose a male, mate, and leave. The male contributes nothing further. She nests, incubates and raises the chicks alone.

Kakapo can store around a kilogram of fat ahead of a breeding season — a rare trait among birds, and an essential one when a male’s job is to sit in a bowl and shout for three months.

What do kakapo eat?

Kakapo are strict herbivores. They eat fruit, seeds, leaves, stems, bark, rhizomes and roots, with rimu fruit central during mast years.

Their feeding leaves an unmistakable sign. A kakapo grips a leaf or stem and grinds the nutritious part out with its bill, leaving behind a crescent-shaped wad of fibre still attached to the plant. These “chews” are a reliable field indicator that kakapo are present — which mattered enormously during the decades when finding kakapo at all was the central problem.

How the kakapo nearly went extinct

Kakapo were abundant when Polynesian settlers arrived, and were hunted for meat and for feathers used in cloaks. The steeper collapse came with European settlement and, above all, with mammals: ship rats, Norway rats, stoats, feral cats and possums.

A ground-nesting bird that freezes when threatened, smells strongly, and cannot fly has no defence against any of them. The kakapo’s entire anti-predator strategy was built for eagles that hunted by sight, including the enormous Haast’s eagle. Against a stoat working by scent, standing still is precisely the wrong move.

Richard Henry, twice

In the 1890s the conservationist Richard Henry moved several hundred kakapo to Resolution Island in Fiordland, one of the earliest organised species translocations anywhere. Stoats reached the island within about six years and the population was destroyed. It was a brilliant idea executed before anyone understood how well stoats swim.

Between 1949 and 1973 the New Zealand Wildlife Service mounted more than sixty expeditions, mostly into Fiordland. They found six birds. All six were male, and all but one died within months in captivity. The species appeared to be functionally extinct — a handful of old males and no females.

In 1975 a single male was caught in Fiordland and named Richard Henry after the man who had tried to save the species eighty years earlier. He turned out to be the last carrier of distinct Fiordland genes, and he eventually sired three chicks with a Rakiura female, folding that lineage back into the population before he died.

The 1977 discovery

Then, in 1977, surveyors found something nobody expected: a population of roughly 200 kakapo on Rakiura / Stewart Island — and this time it included females.

It was also under attack from feral cats. Through the 1980s and 1990s, conservationists made the difficult call to capture essentially every remaining kakapo and move them to predator-free offshore islands. Since then, no kakapo has lived unmanaged.

Why recovery is still hard

More birds have not made the problem simple.

Infertility. Around 40% of kakapo eggs are infertile. The population passed through such a severe bottleneck that the surviving birds are closely related, and inbreeding depresses fertility and embryo survival. A large share of living kakapo have never produced a chick.

Genomics. In response, the Kākāpō125+ project sequenced the genome of every living kakapo, completed in late 2018 — among the first times an entire species has been sequenced individual by individual. Those genomes now inform which birds are paired, which eggs are prioritised, and how disease susceptibility is managed.

Disease. Small, closely related populations concentrated on a few islands are acutely exposed to outbreaks. Respiratory disease has killed adult birds during past seasons, and each loss is a measurable fraction of the species.

Space. At 325 birds the network of suitable predator-free islands is approaching capacity. This is the real significance of Maungatautari: the recovery now needs fenced mainland habitat, which is harder to defend and more expensive to maintain, but far more plentiful.

How long do kakapo live?

Longer than almost any other bird — but the honest answer is that nobody knows the limit.

Kakapo are routinely described as living 90 or even 100 years. The reliable evidence is thinner than those figures suggest: individuals have been monitored for 60-plus years and are still alive and breeding, and the species is clearly extremely long-lived. The higher numbers are extrapolations, not observations. Because intensive monitoring only began in the 1980s, the first fully documented kakapo lifespans have not finished yet.

One consequence is genuinely useful: with a lifespan measured in many decades, a species can sit at very low numbers for a long time without dying out. The kakapo has had time that a shorter-lived bird would not have had.

Kakapo in culture

For Māori the kākāpō was a resource and a presence — hunted for meat, its feathers woven into highly valued cloaks, and occasionally kept.

In modern New Zealand the species has become a conservation emblem, largely through one bird. Sirocco, hand-reared after falling ill as a chick, imprinted on humans and became famous after an incident with a BBC film crew. He was later appointed New Zealand’s official Spokesbird for Conservation and has his own following. Sirocco has never contributed to the breeding programme — imprinted birds generally do not — but he has done more for public awareness of the species than any campaign.

Timeline

FAQs about the kakapo

How many kakapo are left in 2026? 325, as of the official count on 1 September 2026 — the highest in roughly 75 years, after a record 90 chicks fledged from the 2026 breeding season.

Why can’t kakapo fly? They evolved in New Zealand, which had no land mammals for around 80 million years. Without ground predators, flight stopped paying for itself. Kakapo lack the deep keel that anchors flight muscles, but use their wings to parachute down from trees.

Where do kakapo live? On predator-free islands — Whenua Hou / Codfish, Pukenui / Anchor, and Chalky — and at the fenced mainland sanctuary of Maungatautari in Waikato. There is no unmanaged wild population.

Why don’t kakapo breed every year? Breeding is triggered by the mass fruiting, or mast, of the rimu tree, which happens roughly every two to four years.

What is lek breeding? Males gather and display competitively while females visit, choose, and then raise the young alone. The kakapo is the only parrot that breeds this way.

How loud is a kakapo boom? Low-frequency enough to carry several kilometres. Males boom for hours a night, for weeks, from purpose-dug bowls that amplify the sound.

How long do kakapo live? Individuals have been tracked for over 60 years and are still breeding. Figures of 90 or more are commonly quoted but not yet directly observed.

Are kakapo friendly? They show little fear of people, and hand-reared individuals like Sirocco can be strikingly bold. They are a strictly protected species and are not kept as pets.

What is being done to save the kakapo? Predator-free island sanctuaries, intensive nest monitoring, supplementary feeding, artificial incubation and hand-rearing, genomic pairing through the Kākāpō125+ project, and expansion into fenced mainland habitat.

Sources

• Department of Conservation — Kākāpō population reaches new milestone (1 September 2026)
• Department of Conservation — Kākāpō Recovery: history
• Department of Conservation — Kākāpō behaviour
• Department of Conservation — Kākāpō habitat and islands
• Department of Conservation — Kākāpō125+ gene sequencing
• Nature Ecology & Evolution — Species-wide genomics of kākāpō provides transformational tools to accelerate recovery
• New Zealand Birds Online — Kākāpō
• New Zealand Geographic — Kākāpō: bird on the brink

Population figures and conservation status verified 21 September 2026.