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.
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.
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| 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.
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