AFAR Magazine

In search of a flightless, sex-crazed, and rarely seen parrot in a land once ruled by birds.

“You’re not likely to see one,” the volunteer coordinator told me on the phone while I was still in Brooklyn, two months before my trip to New Zealand. “Few volunteers do.”

In November, I was in Invercargill, at the southern tip of the South Island, waiting at the quarantine facility for the puddle-jumper flight that would take me to Codfish Island. I asked the red-haired ranger about my chances of spotting one.

“We leave them alone this time of year,” she said.

“Maybe I’ll come across one while I’m walking around?” I suggested. “Catch one sleeping in a tree somewhere?”

She laughed. “You could be staring straight at a kakapo and not see it. Have you seen the photos?” she asked, gesturing to a bulletin board pinned with images. A dignified old gentleman of a parrot looked back at me, eyes spectacled with a disc of tiny feathers, his mottled bright green cloak a perfect match for the forest floor on which he stood. The bird seemed an artifact of a gentler era, gone the way of the top hat and the calling card: a kakapo—not only the world’s largest parrot but also the only nocturnal one, and the only parrot that does not fly. Once a king of the South Pacific, with numbers in the tens of thousands, the species now consists of a mere 131 specimens on heavily protected island preserves.

Now I was about to leave my wife in the middle of our two-month honeymoon to spend 10 days carrying a heavy pack around a remote island in the Tasman Sea working for the benefit of a rare, beautiful parrot that I would never get to see? What was I thinking?

I’m not much of a birder, but I’ve always been a softy for sad-sack animals like my cat, a rescue who falls off every surface because she was declawed late in life. Plus, this was a chance to experience New Zealand nature as close to its untrammeled state as possible.

The kakapo, once believed extinct, is making a comeback—with significant help from humans. This is only fair, since the birds wouldn’t be in this predicament if it weren’t for us: The Maori, who arrived in New Zealand in the 1200s, brought predatory rats and hunted the birds for their feathers and flavor; and the Europeans, who showed up in the 1800s, carried stoats (ermine) and cats that further annihilated the population. The rangers and scientists of the Kakapo Recovery program are slowly but surely succeeding in their mission to “make more kakapo” by micromanaging the birds’ diet, mating, births, and fledging (preparing to leave the nest)—an obsessive project that requires volunteer support. Lots of it.

Which is how I found myself in the Whenua Hou (fen-ooh-ah HO) Nature Reserve in the late New Zealand spring, tripping over roots and slipping down steep, muddy slopes as I tried to keep pace with Errol Nye, the preserve’s head ranger, and Doug Barlow, my Kiwi co-volunteer. As Errol wriggled around tree trunks and bounced off rocks, his legs appeared to be made of rubber; Doug, a hearty Southlander, ran triathlons in his spare time. “You’ll get your trail legs soon enough,” Errol called over his shoulder as he disappeared under a fallen tree swollen with moss and ferns.