I had to share it with the rest of you.
Possibly one of the most wonderful and unlikely animals on the planet, the kakapo is the largest parrot in the world, nocturnal and utterly flightless. It's response to predators, of which naturally consist of birds of prey, is to sit very still,
sometimes it will flee. Like the dodo, it evolved on an island without any predators. And like the dodo, it was screwed when the western world turned up with rats, cats and stoats (it was already in decline, but still common, since the Maori arrived with their dogs).
Kakapo once thrived in New Zealand as one of its most successful bird species. It is now entirely absent from both the North and South Islands, existing only on a few tiny, immaculately preserved islands to which they were transported. The wonderfully named Codfish Island is now the kakapo capital of the world.
Kakapo are incredibly slow reproducing, and have a unique (among parrots and flightless birds) courtship behaviour, a "polygamous
lek" breeding system, in which a male kakapo digs a "bowl" (a shallow dip of earth kept meticulously clear of plants and detritus) and various tracks leading to the bowl for females, also kept clear by the parrot's diligent gardening. The male will spend up to six months sitting in the bowl, every night "booming" a sort of short low-frequency call that can travel three miles when wind-assisted, to attract females to his bowl. He moves around the move periodically so that it directs his in different directions.
The breeding program this year was hugely successful, raising the world population to a recent high of 124, up from fifty in 1995.
The kakapo's plight was first widely popularised to the world in the book
Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams, who travelled the world with zoologist photographer Mark Carwardine to see several critically endangered species. 20 years on Mark, this time with Stephen Fry, retrace those steps to see all of those same animals that are left, and visited Codfish Island during the Kakapos' mating season.