The chartered Squirrel sets down on Whenua Hou at 6:14 in the morning, the cloud sitting low on the granite of Codfish Island and the pilot keeping the rotor running while two crates of supplementary feed are unloaded onto a tarp.
Dr. Aroha Patete, who has run the Kakapo Recovery field operation since 2023, signs for the freight on a clipboard sheltered under her jacket. She has done this hand-off, in one weather or another, more than four hundred times.
There are 247 kakapo alive in the world as of the April 2026 census. Of those, 168 live on Whenua Hou, the island off the southwest of Rakiura that has been the species' principal refuge since the translocations of 1987 to 1992.
The number 247 is fragile. It is also higher than at any point since written records of the species began.
Kakapo are flightless ground parrots. The males weigh up to four kilograms, lek on hilltops, and produce a low booming call audible across a valley. The females nest in cavities beneath tree roots and incubate alone.
What the species cannot do is coexist with the stoats, rats, and feral cats that arrived with Europeans. Whenua Hou is predator-free because two hundred and twenty-six volunteers and rangers spent four winters removing every kiore from its 1,396 hectares between 1998 and 2002.
Patete walks the eastern transect with two assistants and a small Belgian Malinois named Tui who has been trained to ignore kakapo and signal at mustelid scat. There has been no mustelid scat on Whenua Hou for twenty-four years. Tui works because vigilance does not get to lapse.
The supplementary feed is a pelleted formulation developed at Massey University in 2018, designed to push female body weight above the threshold that triggers breeding in mast years. Rimu masts roughly every two to four years. The last full mast was 2024.
In a mast year, the team's workload triples. In a non-mast year like this one, the work is feed stations, transmitter changes, health checks, and the slow accounting of which birds have died and of what.
Two birds died in the first quarter of 2026. Sirocco-2, a male hatched in 2019, was found beneath a kahikatea with what the necropsy described as a severe cloacal impaction. A female named Heeni died of aspergillosis at the Auckland Zoo veterinary hospital after three weeks of treatment.
Every kakapo has a name. Every name is logged in a database first compiled by Don Merton in the 1980s and now maintained by the Department of Conservation in a shared Postgres instance updated, on average, eleven times a day.
The naming is not sentiment. It is bookkeeping. When the global population is small enough to fit in a school auditorium, the only way to manage genetic diversity is to know exactly who is mating with whom and which lineages are over-represented.
Three of the founding females from the 1977 Stewart Island rediscovery are still living. Their names are Heather, Wendy, and Flossie. Flossie is forty-nine years old and produced two fertile eggs in the 2024 mast.
The recovery has not been linear. In 2019, an outbreak of aspergillosis killed nine birds and required the airlift of two dozen chicks to mainland intensive care. In 2022, an unhatched egg revealed a chromosomal abnormality the team is still trying to characterise.
Dr. Andrew Digby, the Department's senior science adviser on the programme, told the magazine in March that the next survival threshold is not a number but a geography. The recovery requires a second island the size of Whenua Hou. There is no such island available that is not already occupied by another conservation programme.
Anchor Island in Dusky Sound holds 53 birds. Pukenui, off Rakiura, holds another 26. Both are at carrying capacity. The search for a third large refuge has been ongoing since 2017.
The team returns to the hut at 4:40 in the afternoon. Patete eats a cheese sandwich on the porch and writes the day's observations in a hardcover Moleskine she has been using since November. The pages are densely cross-referenced.
Outside, in the low manuka beyond the hut, a kakapo named Konini-3 is moving on the ground. She is fitted with a transmitter the size of a small hen's egg, glued to feathers between her shoulders, and her position is logged every four minutes by a receiver in the hut.
She weighs 1.78 kilograms. She is six years old. If the 2026 rimu fruit set is heavy enough, she will breed for the first time in February of next year.
The recovery does not end. It will not end during the careers of anyone now working on it. The honest figure, as Patete said walking back from the helicopter, is that kakapo will require human supplementary feeding, predator-free islands, and active genetic management for the foreseeable future of the species.
What 247 buys is time. Whether it is enough time depends on questions about climate, fungal disease, and immune diversity that nobody yet knows how to answer.
