For the third year in a row, bird keeper Jasmine ventured to Mt Aspiring National Park for seven days to assist our partners Kea Conservation Trust (KCT) with vital conservation fieldwork.
We’re helping to protect kea in the Matukituki Valley!
Aja Pendergrast, Auckland Zoo
This year, the team caught up 32 wild kea, 29 of which were unbanded. Once each kea is in hand, the team will band any unbanded birds, mainly juveniles or fledglings (attach one metal and two coloured bands to their legs for ID purposes), fit transmitters to adult females so they can be monitored over breeding season, collect morphometric data (beak and head length) and take their weight.
Kea are nationally endangered and their wild population is estimated to be less than 7,000 individuals. The monitoring work that KCT carry out allows conservationists to better understand their reproductive successes, estimate sub-adult and adult kea populations in the valley, and document the risk from predators to these endemic lowland forest-alpine parrots.
Unfortunately, only a very small number of fledglings that hatched in the 2024 breeding season were seen and caught up. This may indicate that fewer females nested this past year and/or that any chicks that hatched were taken by predators. Only three of the five known kea nests were active this season, and it appears that two of the monitored nests failed due to possum predation (eggs and chicks). Evidence of possums were noted at every catch site during the survey.
“If you spot a kea in the wild, look for the letter and colour combinations on their leg bands and visit the keadatabase.nz website to report your observation. This citizen science project is really useful for gaining a wider picture of kea movements”, explains Jasmine.
Auckland Zoo has been supporting KCT since 2009 and you enable this conservation work every time you visit kea at the Zoo.