Kea recognised as endangered on red list of globally threatened species

Thursday, 14 December 2017

Kea are now internationally recognised as endangered.

The plight of the kea has been formally recognised on the world stage after an international conservation organisation for the first time listed it as being endangered.

The large, green mountain parrots are famed for their curiosity and intelligence and in October were voted New Zealand's bird of the year.

The alpine parrots, unique to the South Island, were named New Zealand's bird of the year for 2017.

But their future is in peril, with numbers once in the hundreds of thousands now dwindled to between just 3000 and 7000 birds.

Already recognised as endangered in New Zealand, that status has been officially ratified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List, the world's most comprehensive inventory of threatened species.

Numbers are in such decline that kea have been upgraded from vulnerable to endangered.

Two kea, Wananga and Kerewa, were released in Arthur's Pass in November after being treated for lead poisoning.

* Wananga the cheeky kea rides shotgun in police escort to hospital

* Keeping tabs on Canterbury's increasingly rare kea

Conservationists are calling on people to help the kea's plight by not feeding them.

* Cheeky mountain parrot kea named New Zealand's bird of the year**

The red list upgraded the kea's status from vulnerable following new information that showed numbers are declining rapidly enough for it to be considered endangered.

Every year 60 per cent of kea nests are devastated by predators such as stoats, rats and possums, according to conservation organisation BirdLife, a figure that can rise to 99 per cent during a stoat 'plague'.

Poison baits are used to control introduced mammals and have been shown to significantly improve the success of kea nesting.

But the method cannot be used fully across kea habitats because of the risk of some birds eating them.

Kevin Hackwell, chief conservation adviser at Forest & Bird, said the listing was a 'wake-up call' to take action, with predator control and people not feeding kea being paramount.

He said: 'We just thought we had more birds and that they were doing reasonably well. Sadly that's not the case.'

A study of kea habitat across the South Island between 2009 and 2014 found only 2 per cent of nests were successful in producing birds that grew to adulthood.

That figure rose to 27 per cent after aerial application in 2015 of biodegradable 1080 poison pellets.

Kea also occasionally fall sick from lead poisoning, often chewing on nails and lead flashing in older houses because they like the taste.

But perhaps the greatest conservation challenge is in stopping people feeding kea, Hackwell said.

'It is not just that the food might be dangerous to them, that is not the problem.

'The big problem is feeding them encourages them to try novel foods, so they then eat anything that looks like a novel food.

'Those kea that are not interacting with people are much more conservative about what they eat, so when we use 1080 we don't get any deaths.'

In areas such as Arthur's Pass and ski fields where people - particularly tourists - feed the birds, success with using 1080 to cull predators has the downside of killing kea that have grown curious enough to eat the poison because they have been fed.

But while the trend is of a general decline in kea numbers, their fate is far from sealed.

Hackwell said: 'Despite the fact that we have had to upgrade (the threat), we have the ability to reverse it.

'If we can just stop people feeding kea that will make a big difference.'

Kea are among a host of famed birds that face a struggle for survival and are on the red list.

Overfishing and ocean changes caused by climate change have affected the key prey species of black-legged kittiwakes, decimating the bird's colonies in the Pacific and North Atlantic.

Cape gannets in South Africa and Namibia are now endangered after overfishing devastated their food source, and snowy owls in North America are in decline because climate change is affecting their prey, BirdLife said.

Though almost 700 of the world's bird species are now classed as endangered or critically endangered, it is not all doom and gloom - two species of kiwi have recovered to the point of no longer being endangered after a 30-year programme to stabilise their numbers.