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. 😊