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Wellington / DPA
New Zealand’s alpine parrots live life at full throttle, perching on car roofs as they surf down mountain highways, hanging out at ski-field cafes and vandalizing cars just for fun.
But the same keen intelligence that has enabled the kea to survive in the extreme environment of the Southern Alps is placing them in danger.
Many suffer lead poisoning because of their fatal attraction to nails and flashings, which they rip from the roofs of buildings. Others are run over by cars while hanging around tourist hot spots.
At least one has been killed while car surfing, the chair of the Kea Conservation Trust Tamsin Orr-Walker said.
“The ones who are good at it, that are strong flyers, have a great time getting great lift under their wings, but it is the younger birds that aren’t strong enough yet that would actually do a face plant into the road when they came off and die,†Orr-Walker said.
“We have been trying to make people aware: before you drive away just swish the birds off the top of the roof,” she said.
The birds are by turns engaging and infuriating.
In one famous incident, two climbers were locked inside an alpine hut in Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park by a kea who slid the door bolt across while they lay sleeping. It took the climbers an hour of jostling and shaking the door before they could escape.
“They are a lot of fun to be around when you are out in wilderness areas or up at the ski fields,” Orr-Walker said.
“But when you are trying to go to sleep at night and there are birds sliding down the side of your tent or they have locked you in a hut somewhere or they are throwing stones at the windows or tearing the rubber off your car, then they can become a little bit frustrating as well,” she added.
Since the earliest days of European settlement, there has been conflict between kea and humans.
In the 19th century when farmers grew exasperated with kea killing sheep on high country farms, the government introduced a bounty on their beaks. By the time it was lifted 100 years later, more than 150,000 kea were dead.
“A lot of people still consider them to be a nuisance and pests, so we still do have kea that are shot or poisoned by people,” Orr-Walker said.
The trust has set up a conflict resolution programme to help people deal with groups of young kea when they are going through their ‘juvenile delinquent’ stage.
Heliworks, which offers scenic helicopter flights from tourist resort Queenstown, is one company that has been forced to adopt anti-kea measures, setting up water sprinklers on top of their helicopters during overnight stays in wilderness areas.
General manager Richard Mills said kea attack the rotor heads, ripping off the rubber components used to dampen vibration, and could cause serious damage if left to their own devices.
“They are destructive little blighters, but then again, we are in their area, aren’t we?” Mills said.
In the South Island, the Kea Conservation Trust has built two dedicated kea playgrounds in an effort to divert the birds from more
dangerous pursuits.
The first kea playground was built near a forestry site, where the birds had been “trashing” equipment once staff left the work site at the end of the day.
The attempt to divert the kea was only partially successful, Orr-Walker said, with the birds destroying one of the playground video cameras.
“The most interesting thing is generally the thing that they are not supposed to be getting into,” she said.
Like other native birds in New Zealand, the greatest threat to kea is from predators. The birds nest in ground burrows, making eggs and chicks vulnerable to attack from predators such as stoats and possums, animals which were brought to the country in the 19th
century.
The Kea Conservation Trust began sounding the alarm about the future of the cheeky parrots after research on a group of kea living in the Nelson Lakes National Park showed an 80 per cent decline in the population over a 10-year period.
They now estimate there are fewer than 5,000 birds remaining, with the population sparsely distributed over a 3.5-million-hectare area of the South Island.
Orr-Walker welcomed a government plan announced this year to rid the country of pest species, such as stoats and rats, by 2050, but for those charged with protecting kea it poses extra challenges.
While stoats and possums pose a major threat to kea, the traps and poison used to kill these introduced pests can also kill the inquisitive parrots, which break into traps and eat poison.
“If we have no predator-control, kea will definitely slide into extinction, but we have to be very, very careful about the predator-control that is used, that it doesn’t then impact on the birds as well,” Orr-Walker said.
