This is a brilliant story. I loves it.
The kakapo, the large flightless green parrot from New Zealand, does its best to become extinct by not laying many eggs, not looking after its eggs very well, only mating when a single species of tree fruits (which happens approximately once every three years), and being fair game to almost every predator introduced to New Zealand. The Kakapo Recovery Programme works very hard to save it from itself/extinction.
The Kakapo Recovery Programme relocated all known kakapos to some small islands off the coast of the North Island of New Zealand. These islands were cleared of stoats, rats, and other non-native animals to give the kakapos a fighting chance. Slowly, their numbers increased. The birds were all tagged with radio transmitters.
About 21 years ago, four male kakapos were released onto Whenua Hou/Codfish Island. They were lost for so long that the wardens assumed they were dead. But not so. One of the kakapo wardens heard some booming, the male kakapo's mating call, went to investigate, and found one of the missing four kakapo.
Said a kakapo warden, "“Here you have a kakapo that remained undetected for 21 years on a highly managed island then consider the scale of Fiordland, there could easily be a few more out there but it’s completely needle in a haystack stuff.”
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