The numbers of kea are spiralling downward and there is a real fear the species is flying towards oblivion. Leading kea researchers, volunteers and supporters from around the country are meeting involved parties this weekend in Arthurs Pass for the first Kea Konvention to try to come up with a plan to save the South Island’s endemic parrot. Kerrie Waterworth reports.
Paul Van Klink is passionate about kea.
With winter approaching, the Wanaka man has taken the day off work as a Fish and Game officer to drive up to Treble Cone ski area and affix signs to the outdoor furniture warning picnickers not to leave their rubbish or to feed the kea.
"It’s about educating the public. In winter when there’s not much food in the wild the birds come down here and become what we call ‘junk food kea’, eating chocolate and anything they can find. They also get used to being around humans and combined with their inquisitiveness and mischievousness they get into all sorts of bother, like eating poison and lead and getting run over by cars."
A supporter of the Kea Conservation Trust for more than a decade, he is delivering a talk at the Kea Konvention this weekend, about the anecdotal decline of kea.
In the past few weeks he has been interviewing friends and contacts who work at other skifields to gauge the extent of the decline and "it’s not looking good".
"My feeling is that Treble Cone is going to be the last commercial skifield with kea. They’re disappearing at an alarming rate. I interviewed a guy at Broken River skifield who has been there 30 years and he didn’t see one kea last year. At Porters skifield they saw nine kea last year, which is the fewest number that has ever been there and at the Remarkables kea only go there at night."
Mr Van Klink estimates 15 kea come and go during the winter season at Treble Cone and even though much is being done to save these birds, the biggest issue is what is happening in the wild.
"I’ve spoken to high country farmers, landscape photographers and base jumpers and they’re just not seeing them anymore. It’s a massive problem and no-one is taking it seriously.
"The Department of Conservation is hugely underfunded and they just keep thinking by throwing 1080 at it and trapping predators they’re going to solve it — well, it ain’t."
Eco Wanaka Adventures has also noticed a fall in kea numbers.It took kea off its Rob Roy glacier walk brochure as clients could no longer be guaranteed to see one.
Co-owner Lee Riley says when the business first started 10 years ago, a kea would usually be seen at the lunch spot on the Rob Roy trip, but that changed four or five years ago.
Now the company does not promise tourists they will see a kea, only that they might hear one, something which has only recently started happening.
"There has been all this wonderful stoat, possum and feral cat trapping up in the Matukituki Valley, so we’re hoping the kea may be starting to come back."
There is across-the-board agreement that mammalian predators are the No1 threat to kea.
Before stoats, possums, cats, rats and mice were introduced, kea had a range that extended from Waitutu River in Fiordland to Farewell Spit (it is exclusively a South Island bird, although a 10,000-year-old kea fossil has been found in the Waitomo caves).
Today the kea have gone from the Catlins forests, the Blue Mountain forests near Southland, and Marlborough.
They are ‘‘thin on the ground’’ in Kaikoura, and even thinner along the eastern edge of Otago and Canterbury but populations are doing better on the West Coast.
Estimates put only 1000 to 5000 of the birds remaining in the wild.
Department of Conservation science adviser Josh Kemp, of Christchurch, says kea are also at a disadvantage because, unlike nearly all other parrots in the world, they do not nest in trees.
Kea evolved in a harsh forest free landscape during a glaciated ice age and lost their habit of nesting in trees.Instead, they nest in a burrow deep in the ground, under a beech trees roots or large rock outcrop.
Their only enemies originally came from the sky so their defence was to freeze or go underground, he says.
"New Zealand used to have a range of avian carnivores such as the giant Haast eagle and they hunted by sight and during the day.
"Now their enemies hunt them by smell and at night.
"Keas don’t know how to fight, so when a stoat comes they freeze or run away and hope the stoat eats the eggs instead of them. They’re perfect stoat prey."
Predation may be the biggest threat to kea but coming into contact with humans is not far behind.
"Kea are right up there in terms of intelligence, learning and problem-solving, and they’re also very social and curious, so there are real risks to kea in the touristy areas like Arthurs Pass, the glacier country, the West Coast, the Milford Track and Milford Sound," Mr Kemp says.
"People find it really hard to resist feeding them and I actually saw a man say ‘I’ll only do it this once, just this once. My kids are here and I want to show them a kea up close and get one good photo’ and then he fed it junk food."
Despite widespread agreement kea numbers are in decline, Mr Kemp admits Doc has no kea recovery plan.
Under Doc’s "Battle of the Birds" programme, predator control using 1080 poison pellet aerial drops and traps has expanded to the point where 20% of kea habitat is almost predator-free.
"Our nest and kea tracking research is showing populations in that area are growing and will produce a surplus which could offset the declining populations in the other 80%."
But even he questions whether that 20% predator-controlled area is enough to sustain kea in the wild.
"We need to get it up to more like 50% if we want to be able to tramp through somewhere where you think you ought to see and hear a kea and have a good chance of that happening."
Mr Kemp hopes the Kea Konvention will produce a kea recovery plan or a strategic document, but believes it must also include a widespread education campaign.
"The days of feeding kea and getting a good close look at it have to end. We need to be educating kids in schools and reach out to tourists as they arrive in their camper vans and head off to Arthurs Pass and have people at these places saying ‘Don’t go near the kea’."
He is optimistic kea will survive.
"Kea have an innate ability to bounce back if conditions are right. We shot 155,000 kea over 100 years thanks to a bounty being placed on them in the 19th century to stop them eating sheep on high country farms and they didn’t go extinct.
"If we keep up the predator control and leave their nests alone, the chick survival rate is 70% to 80%."
Mr Van Klink is not so optimistic.
"We really need to get some traction out of Doc at this meeting. We need to identify where do we want to keep kea and we have to do something about it because they are going down the gurgler that quick."
Forest and Bird strategic adviser Geoff Key, of Arthurs Pass, who will also attend the Kea Konvention, says Doc needs to make a commitment to save kea, or there is a risk the parrot will join the list of birds threatened with extinction.
"We know Doc is under a lot of strain financially, but we also know that conservation gets results. Just look at the takahe and kakapo. They’re going to have to spend money to get the same results with kea."
Peter Hilary, a passionate supporter of kea since he started climbing in alpine mountains with his father, Sir Edmund Hilary, as a child, will be the keynote speaker at the conference.
He has said kea are "as important to New Zealand as the bald eagle is to America" and should be the poster bird for a predator-free New Zealand by 2050.
The hope will be that in the meantime it does not become the poster bird for extinctions instead.
