Avian Predators of New Zealand, Part 2

Haast’s eagle wasn’t the only bird that used to take on moa. Meet the kea, the Gremlin of the air.

The colorful kea. Image provided by Dan Clem.

Cute, huh? These little guys live on the South Island of New Zealand, mostly in high-altitude forest. People often come across kea at ski areas or on mountain hikes. Kea typically eat berries and shoots. They’re very inquisitive, perhaps even destructively so. In kea country, cloth-top Jeeps are a bad idea. Here’s a video of kea systematically dismantling an SUV (and a very patient person’s boots).

Very mischievous and cute, right? So it stands to reason that starting in the late 1800s, humans tried to systematically exterminate them. (That was sarcasm, for those who can’t tell.) But there’s more to this particular reckless slaughter than the normal human idiocy. There’s a mystery involved.

Here’s an excerpt from a 1906 article entitled Notes on the Flesh-eating propensity of the Kea (Nestor Nobilis), by W.B. Benham, who was a professor of biology at the University of Otago at the time.

In or about the year 1867 it was observed that on certain sheep-runs in Otago, in the neighbourhood of Lake Wanaka, sheep were wounded in a rather mysterious manner. It was noticed in the case of sheep killed for food that a healed wound occurred sometimes in the loin or sides; when shearing, too, similar healed and even open wounds were found in or about the region of the loins; also, when mustering, sheep were seen with more or less pronounced wounds, raw and bleeding, and even with entrails hanging out of large holes in the side of the abdomen.

Some assumed the wounds were due to disease, but the sheep’s owners also instructed their shepherds to look for any other possible cause of these injuries. The answer came back: the kea. Cute by day, but don’t feed them after midnight.

Here’s what pasture owner Henry Campbell wrote in 1904, recounting events he observed in 1868:

There I saw the kea at work. He would come down from the rocks, settle on a sheep’s loin, and peck into the sheep, which would run through the mob; but [the bird] stuck to the sheep all the time till he got a piece out of the sheep, then he would fly to the rocks.

Below is a video of a kea attack. Note: not for the squeamish, or those easily frightened by demonic-looking birds at night. The second half of the movie shows how hunters attracted kea, a practice that is now illegal.

Word spread about the sheep-pecking, and pasture owners began to award a bounty for each kea beak brought in. There isn’t a record of these transactions prior to 1898, but between that year and 1929, hunters turned in 54,204 kea beaks for the reward. By the time the New Zealand government protected the kea in 1970, over 150,000 of the birds had been shot for bounties.

Kea still have problems. The International Union of Concerned Naturalists (IUCN) lists them as vulnerable. Although hunting by humans has (mostly) stopped, introduced mammals such as stoats and cats have spread into their range. It’s not known how widespread their predation is.

In addition, the famous curiosity of the kea puts them at risk. Kea like to eat shiny, lead-filled objects like flashings on houses and nail heads. Conservationists are working on kea repellents to keep them away from buildings, and are also trying to convince builders to use lead-free materials.

In the meantime, as we continue to threaten the existence of the kea, at least they know how to prank us back.

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