Fertility ≠ Hatching Success ≠ Chick survival

 When the kākāpō live nest cam goes down for the weekend these are the kind of things that happen... poor unsuspecting  kākāpō fans who follow along on Facebook and go there to unsuspectingly make comments or ask simple questions of the Kākāpō Recovery Team - such as...

 

... and get replies like the following from kākāpōbirdnerds in withdrawal from their 24/7 kākāpō fix.... 

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For kākāpō, there isn’t really a single “normal” fertility percentage. It can vary a lot between breeding seasons depending on things like the age of the birds, which males mate, how many matings happen, and whether techniques like artificial insemination are used. 

Today’s population came from only a small number of surviving birds (40 founder birds contribute to the current populations gene pool - and the majority of those already came from a genetically restricted population). Low genetic diversity is a big part of the fertility challenge. In some past years fertility was devastatingly low - for example 2014 only 40% eggs were fertile. In 2016, 122 eggs were laid, with 59 initially classed as infertile (just above 50% fertility).

 In 2026, 256 eggs were laid and 148 of them were recorded as fertile. 

It is important to separate fertility from hatching success. More recent research has shown that some eggs once thought to be infertile were actually fertilised, but the embryo died very early in development. This is referred to as early embryo loss and is not visible with standard candling checks. Therefore some older infertility figures likely included very early embryo loss (maybe as many as three quarters of eggs thought infertile may actually have been very early embryo death). Infertile eggs are now part of research using intense microscope work to gather  more accurate data on infertility vs early embryo death.

Of this year's 148 fertile eggs, around 105 hatched. 

The Recovery team actively works to improve fertility rates. One tool used in recent breeding seasons is artificial insemination (AI). This is partly based on observations that females who mate multiple times, or with multiple males, have a higher chance of producing fertile eggs.

 For example - a female who mates twice with the same male has improved chance of fertile eggs; if she mates with two different males there is a 90% chance eggs will be fertile! AI can help replicate that effect and has improved fertility in recent breeding seasons (it is also a useful tool for increasing genetic diversity).

Another important consideration is chick survival. 

Fertility does not equal hatch success, and hatch success does not equal chick survival (Fertility ≠ Hatching Success ≠ Chick survival)

Even when improved fertility is achieved, kākāpō still have to contend with embryo deaths that reduce hatch rates, and then the hatched chicks must survive to fledge. There are perils after hatching as well! Of the 105 chicks hatched, so far only 11 have been lost to various causes.

The best thing we can do is talk about, follow and support the Kākāpō Recovery Team's mahi.

Kākāpō face many hurdles to population growth in the modern world (the above being just a few!), which is why the ongoing work of the Kākāpō Recovery Programme is so important in building a healthy, sustainable population for the future. I am very grateful to be able to follow their work! 

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 Yes.. I did that. I do realise this was a short Facebook question and I’ve responded like I’m defending a thesis.

I arrived to answer a question and somehow built a Kākāpō Visitor Centre.

In hindsight, “yes, it varies” was available to me.

I miss our kākāpō nest! 

If anyone needs me, I’ll be peer-reviewing my own Facebook replies. 

The Nest Stopped Behaving

 

For months, everything important happened in a carefully engineered depression in the ground.

The crater.

Feeds happened there. Sleep happened there. Growth happened there. Even the mess, neatly contained to the rim, efficiently handled by an ecosystem of dedicated little clean-up crews, had its place.

It was orderly.

Predictable.

Reassuring.

And then, quite abruptly, it wasn’t.

The nest stopped behaving!

There was a relatively brief, almost comical interlude where one of the chicks (then both, then mum!) made a very public appearance directly in front of the camera. A formal announcement that the rules no longer apply.

Then the real shift began. The crater was no longer the centre of gravity. The back right corner, quickly and decisively branded “the naughty corner,” took over.

 

Although, it’s not fair to fully label this as disruption, it’s development!

We are past the peak growth acceleration phase now. This was when the chicks chunked up rapidly and, for those of us watching many many many hours a day – it felt a lot like you could actually see them grow.

Growth is still happening, but it has stabilised. The chicks are beginning to self-regulate their intake rather than relying entirely on instinctive demand feeding. Research from hand-rearing contexts suggests that not force-feeding or overfilling at this stage is actually healthier—they are starting to participate in their own feeding rhythms.

We’re out of the “tiny blob that eats” phase.

What we have now are huge baby parrots, increasingly mobile, increasingly aware, and increasingly inclined to make decisions of their own.

And apparently one of those decisions involved leaving the carefully curated bowl they have lived in since hatching.

The timing may have been nudged but the direction was inevitable.

 

The immediate effect has been… chaos. The good kind.

Chicks are no longer neatly contained. They can stomp around if they want. They reposition. They end up in places that feel, from a viewer’s perspective, deeply inconvenient and therefore extremely interesting. The once-reliable system of “everything happens in the crater” has been replaced with “OMG Where are they now?!”

The crater, once the hub of all activity, now sits empty - an abandoned set piece from an earlier act.

The practical implications are immediate. The Great Wall of Poop is no more. It will not, it turns out, be visible from space after all.

 The resident invertebrate clean-up crew, who had previously enjoyed a highly efficient workflow, now appear to be operating under significantly less clear direction.

Rakiura, for her part, has had to adjust quickly. Returns to the nest are no longer straightforward. Instead of arriving to a predictable configuration, she is now required to locate her offspring, who may or may not be where they were last left. Notably, her reaction to finding N2 out of the crater and near the entrance/exit carried a visibly stronger moment of surprise than when she first returned to find two four-week-old chicks instead of one. That spatial shift mattered.

Even the logistics of routine nest checks have become a topic of speculation. Now that the chicks are no longer conveniently located in the centre, questions naturally arise: can they be reached as easily? Will they cooperate? Do the team have tools for this?

 

But perhaps the most interesting shift hasn’t happened in the nest at all.

It’s happened in the chat.

There’s been a noticeable change in tone since the chicks moved out of the nest bowl and into what has now been firmly branded “the naughty corner.” Up until that point, the chat often orbited around routine (feeds, weights, timings) but this new free range phase has introduced something more dynamic: shared uncertainty and a kind of low-level suspense. When the chicks are no longer neatly contained in the centre of the frame, the experience becomes less about observing a predictable process and more about participating in a moment that is still unfolding.

You can see that shift in comments like “they're much more settled now they've got more room” (@4SaveOurBirds) and “I think moving around in the nest as much as possible is probably good for them” (@Antikyth), where the community begins actively interpreting behaviour rather than just reacting to it.

At the same time, the humour hasn’t gone anywhere… it’s just evolved. Instead of reacting to isolated cute moments, the chat now builds ongoing narratives. Heath Fledger has become a background agent of chaos (“I love this Prison Break reboot” – @kamifrommars), while N2 takes on the role of slightly uncoordinated protagonist, complete with failed turning attempts and dramatic sleepy collapses (“turning attempt aborted, critical sleepy reached” – @shramp5994). She is earning her nick name Nora The Explorer for sure right now!

Even the environment becomes part of the story: leaves are named, tracked, and eventually mourned (“cupcake got destroyed” – @tortoiseplaysvr9811, referring to CupCakeWrapper/Frog Leaf, a set-piece of the nest cavity environment that remained stoically unmoved for over 2 months before the recent chaos). This shared language creates continuity in a chat that otherwise moves far too quickly for any single thread to survive.

 Cup Cake Wrapper /Frog Leaf (CCWFL) - in calmer days before the chaos!

Rakiura constructing the Naughty Corner (note: no sign of CCWF Leaf).

  

There’s also a growing sense of collective expertise. The further the chicks move from the bowl, the more the chat leans on shared knowledge to make sense of what they’re seeing. Questions about thermoregulation, feeding behaviour, and even insect life in the nest are met with layered responses - some speculative, some grounded, but increasingly informed. You can see this in exchanges like “maybe to check what they're eating or that the bugs are healthy or something?” (@kiri_of_all_time commenting on the Ranger taking a sample of the poop bugs), followed by others building on the idea. Even small corrections - like clarifying genetics versus location in plumage colour expression - are absorbed and carried forward. The chat is no longer just reacting in real time; it’s accumulating and sharing understanding.

And threading through all of it is a kind of gentle, shared investment. People hesitate to leave (“I’m really hungry, but I can’t go to the kitchen now because I don’t want to miss anything lol” – @Diana-Fortyseven), welcome each other back, and repeatedly urge newcomers to “scroll back 12 hours!” to catch up on what they missed.

There’s a sense not only that something important might happen at any moment – but that it’s better experienced together.

Even the quieter periods carry that weight: “so peaceful” (@dw4769), “catching the Zs” (@Allialliallialii), little acknowledgements that the value isn’t just in the big events, but in being there, collectively, while nothing much happens at all.

The crater gave us something neat. Contained. Interpretable.

The Back Corner is giving us something else entirely.

Less tidy. Less predictable. Occasionally inconvenient. Frequently hilarious. And, in a way that’s harder to define but easy to feel … far more alive.

The nest hasn’t stopped working.

It’s just stopped behaving according to plan.

“Interesting” just leveled up!

 

Postscript: if you haven't already, please come and join us in the live camchat watching this rare bird do her part to add to the current kākāpō population of 235 individuals.

Science = Hope

 

Yesterday, in the gap that is currently almost constantly filled by a flightless parrot sitting quietly in a hollow under a tree raising a chick, I was searching for another rock to stand on due to a technical live cam error and I saw a rocket lifting off the ground.

Thousands of tonnes of engineered certainty, fire, noise, and a level of commitment that suggests someone, somewhere, was very confident that this would work.

At first glance, these things have nothing in common.

One is quite spectacular, there’s flames and noise and it looks like Michael Bay had something to do with it.

 

 

The other is… not.

 

And yet, if you look past the obvious differences - scale, technology, budget, and the general absence of explosions in one of them…the resemblance starts to appear.

Not in what is being done.

In how... and maybe, why.

 

The space programme is often presented as a series of moments.

A launch. A landing. A photograph. A quote.

But none of those things happen on their own.

They are the visible tip of something much less cinematic: thousands of people checking, re-calibrating, re-running, managing contingencies, tracking variables and occasionally discovering that something they were very sure about is not, in fact, correct.

It is not a straight line of progress.

 It is a loop.

Try.
Fail.
Understand.
Adjust.
Try again.

The kākāpō recovery programme looks different on the surface, but the pattern is familiar.

There are no countdowns. No global broadcasts. No slow-motion replays.

Instead: chick checks in the dark. Monitoring signals. Moving eggs. Waiting on rimu. Adjusting feeding. Watching. Recording. Trying again next breeding season.

Less fire. More spreadsheets.

But the same loop.

We do not have to do any of this.

No one is required to send humans around the moon again.

No one is required to spend decades trying to recover a flightless parrot in a remote New Zealand forest.

And yet, we do.

When John F. Kennedy stood in front of a crowd in 1962 and said the United States chooses to go to the Moon not because it was easy, but because it was hard, he wasn’t really just talking about rockets.

He was talking about a particular kind of human instinct. The one that looks at something difficult, uncertain, and wildly impractical, and decides it is worth doing anyway.

The kākāpō programme carries a quieter version of the same idea.

Don Merton once framed it more bluntly: if we can’t save something as distinctive, as remarkable, (dare I add, as charismatic!) as a kākāpō, what chance do we have of saving anything else?

Neither of these are practical arguments.

They are not about efficiency. They are not even, strictly speaking, about outcomes.

They are about something harder to quantify.

What we choose to care about.
What we decide is worth the effort.
What we are prepared to keep trying, even when success is not guaranteed.

 

It is tempting to see this as a story about technology, or conservation, or progress.

It isn’t. Not really.

The similarity between sending humans around the moon again and persisting in the effort to increase the population of a parrot, that is literally a biological refugee, is not the outcome.

It is the pattern. A very old one.

 

The scientific method has evolved into a discipline that is often described as a system for discovering truth.

In practice, it looks suspiciously like a refusal to be discouraged by being wrong.

Form a hypothesis. Test it. Discover it does not hold. Adjust. Repeat.

This is not a new invention.

It is a disciplined version of something much older.

Try something.
It doesn’t work.
Try again, slightly differently.

Humans have been doing this for a very long time.

Long before we named it.
Long before we wrote it down and attached funding proposals to it.

Curiosity, persistence, pattern recognition.

The ability to build on what we know.

These are not modern traits but they are the traits of humanity. The traits that separate us from the rest of the living things.

What is modern is what we build with them.

Stretch those traits across people, across time, across generations… and you get something larger than any individual effort.

A recovery programme.

A space programme.

We are not especially good at getting things right the first time.

Or the second.

Or the third.

The history of both space exploration and conservation makes that clear.

Things fail. Sometimes catastrophically. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes repeatedly.

And yet, we continue.

 

So what? (aka Shine, what is your point?!)

It is easy, at the moment, to feel as though essential things are being lost.

That we are less capable, less connected, less able to do the kinds of things that once seemed possible.

But if you look at the structures we sustain - over decades, across generations, in the face of uncertainty - a different picture emerges.

The underlying traits are still there.

Curiosity.
Care.
Persistence.
Fallibility.
The ability to learn.
The willingness to try again.

Artemis II leaves the ground, carrying with it the accumulated learning of everything that came before.

The same thing is true when a DOC ranger checks a chick in the dark, noting weight, respiration, small signs of progress or concern.

Neither guarantees an outcome. Both are part of the same pattern.

Humans, attempting something difficult, uncertain and not strictly necessary … and doing it anyway.

Science is a way of thinking. A way of probing the dark when we’re not sure if we know what is there.

(It’s also our best defence against ignorance, manipulation, and self-deception – thanks Carl Sagan and your Demon-Haunted World!)

 

Science is not driven by certainty… it is sustained by the decision to continue without it!

That sounds like hope…

 

 

Post Script: The term biological refugee was directly from this clip of Dr Ron Moorhouse, kākāpō guru.