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.

Cam gone, hearts buffering

 

 

The kākāpō cam being down for 10+ hours is really testing the resilience of the ecosystem (us).

 Morale declining. Productivity questionable. Refresh button worn smooth.
Somewhere on Whenua Hou, everything is absolutely fine - and the team are working to get us back online ❤️

 

Cam gone, hearts buffering
Forest carries on unseen
Rangers hold the line... 

 

Post script: cam back up at about 14:06.  

The Forest Must Say Yes...

 

You might think that once everything is in place;

·         The male booming (I just explained it)

·         The female nesting (we’re watching it)

…there is no reason kākāpō chicks can’t happen every year.

They don’t.

There is a third party in this relationship.

The forest must also consent to a kākāpō breeding season.

Kākāpō females only breed when food is abundant because chicks – even though they weigh a mere 30 g at hatch – require a huge energy investment.

Their existence relies on a particular chain of events that must occur in a certain order.

And then, even once the chicks actually exist, their survival depends on timing.

 

The Missing Ingredient

For the current population, the deciding final word on whether kākāpō chicks happen in any given year…is an ancient, slightly unusual conifer.

Rimu.   

A tree with a seeding cycle that is not annual.

A tree that has a fruiting cycle that depends on temperatures over multiple years.

A tree that must also experience the right conditions in the actual fruiting season for that seeding effort to succeed.

The kākāpō breeding cue is rather  unfathomably linked to these  ‘mast seeding events’.

The more you learn about this relationship, the more extraordinary it starts to feel that these birds still exist at all.

Just to top off the near impossibility of it all – the kākāpō breeding cue does not actually require the ripe fruit – just the sign that there is going to be some (and that turns out to be a dangerous basket to put all your eggs in too - pardon the pun!).

This whole rimu thing is so mystical, I think we’ll talk more about it another time.

  

The reason we are watching this chick right now…
is because the forest said yes this year. 😊