A green parrot for St Patrick's Day

Today being St Patrick's Day, I looked for something green to photograph and eventually settled on a stuffed specimen of a parrot known as the kakapo. They look a lot better when they are alive!

The kakapo is the rarest and strangest of parrots; it is the only flightless parrot and the only nocturnal parrot that there is. Furthermore it is the world's heaviest parrot, weighing in at up to 3.5 kilograms or, since it is an ancient creature, let's call it 8 lbs.

Kakapos are found in New Zealand and no-where else in the world. Once there were hundreds of thousands of them but now there are just 60 or so left in the wild.
New Zealand is an ancient and isolated group of islands. Before the arrival of the Polynesians, in the thirteenth century, the country was free of mammals, apart from 2 species of bats, for millions of years. It was a place dominated by birds and reptiles. In the absence of mammalian predators the ancestors of the kakapo gradually lost their ability to fly and this meant that the parrot was very vulnerable when man arrived. The Polynesians devastated the population hunting the kakapo for food and for its feathers as well as by felling and burning the forests in which the birds lived. They also brought with them the Polynesian rat, or kiore which ate the eggs of the ground nesting parrot.

Matters became even worse after the arrival of Europeans in the 1800s who brought with them a wide range of domestic and wild mammals including predatory stoats and feral cats. Europeans also ate the birds; it is said that during the gold rush of the 1860-70s, diggers lived on a diet of kakapo, until they tired of the taste!

Finally, once the kakapo came to the attention of the scientific community every museum wanted one for its collections. The demand almost caused the final extinction of the bird.