Thirty years ago, New Zealand's kākāpō recovery program started with just 51 birds. This season alone, it added 90 chicks — a single-season record that took 16 years to match back when the program began.

  • 325 kākāpō now alive, the highest total in roughly 75 years
  • 90 chicks fledged in the 2026 breeding season, a single-season record
  • 51 birds (20 females) founded the recovery program in 1995
  • 13 breeding seasons completed since 1995, after a 4-year gap before this one

Why this season was different

The kākāpō is a flightless, nocturnal parrot found only in New Zealand, and it very nearly didn't make it. By the 1990s predators and habitat loss had pushed the species to the edge of extinction, leaving a founding population too small for comfort.

The Department of Conservation says this year's breeding season broke records specifically because the team changed how it worked, not just how much it worked. Rangers trialled fewer egg and chick checks, leaned on remote nest-monitoring technology instead of constant hands-on intervention, and cut back supplementary feeding.

"We had a four-year gap between breeding seasons, so it's fantastic to finally see the population increase after all that time," said Deidre Vercoe, DOC's Kākāpō Recovery Operations Manager. "It's also a significant milestone for the species, as the last time the population is thought to have exceeded 300 birds may have been as long as 75 years ago."

"In the early years of recovery, it took 16 years to produce that many chicks," Vercoe said of this season's 90 hatchlings. "There is still a long road of recovery ahead."

The long road back to Rakiura

Nearly every bird in the modern population traces back to Rakiura (Stewart Island), the ancestral home of the founders. Tāne Davis, who represents Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu on the Kākāpō Recovery Group, says the next phase of the program is about restoring that connection, not just counting birds.

"Our focus is increasingly on determining where intensive intervention is still needed and where we can start to return to more natural levels of kākāpō breeding outcomes," Davis said. The long-term goal is a predator-free Rakiura, where kākāpō could one day live without the round-the-clock protection the species currently requires on predator-free offshore islands.

Low genetic diversity is still a real constraint. Decades of inbreeding from a tiny founding population has caused infertility and poor hatching success in past seasons, which is part of why a 90-chick season stands out so sharply against the program's history.

Most of this year's chicks will be named on the anniversary of their hatch day next February and March, following a recovery-program tradition. But in a sign of how far the species has come, a small number of 2026 chicks will stay unnamed — the first kākāpō in the modern recovery era not to get one, as the program edges toward treating the species as a stable wild population rather than a managed emergency case.

Meridian Energy, the program's national partner since 2016, says the population has grown by more than 200 birds in the decade it has supported the recovery effort through funding, infrastructure and volunteer coordination. None of it happens without people in the field: volunteers and rangers still physically weigh and check chicks by hand, often at night, in the same remote forest where the species has clung on for three decades.

The kākāpō remains critically endangered. But for a bird that numbered barely 50 individuals a generation ago, 325 and climbing is the kind of number conservationists spend careers chasing.