14 Kakapo Chicks! 105 and counting!

A major landmark has been reached with this year's astonishing Kakapo breeding season. Lizzy's Diary entry for March 11 reveals that 14 Kakapo chicks have hatched so far, bringing us up to 105 Kakapos! FANTASTIC NEWS, and there's more to come...

Celebrations of the 100th bird took place on March 8 – well, as celebratory as 32 people can get at 5.30pm two bottles of fizzy between them, shortly before carrying a car battery up a hill and spending a wet-windy night eyes glued to ‘kakapo TV’.

Talking to Graeme Elliott, kakapo scientist, it seems that the team has high hopes for the bird’s future. "This marks a milestone in kakapo recovery – the first time the kakapo have been in three figures for 30 years* and the biggest breeding season in the history of the species’ management,” Graeme tells me. He has been working on their recovery for 14 years from a time when numbers were in their low 50s.