The number of kea – New Zealand’s nationally endangered mountain parrot – is growing in numbers in Canterbury’s Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park.
The average flock size in the Malte Brun area in 2024 was twice that seen two years before.
Work in the area to get rid of possums, stoats and other pests over thousands of hectares has been done by Te Manahuna Aoraki Project – part of Zero Invasive Predators.
Initial elimination operations have now been carried out across 30,000ha in the alpine zone and 4000ha in the tussock dryland/farmland.
The Project hopes to scale-up to about 300,000ha in the long-term.
Nick Foster, the technical lead for Te Manahuna Aoraki Project, told RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme it was difficult to determine the exact increase in numbers, “but the numbers that we started with are looking to have increased quite significantly over the last couple of years”.
“The first two years were quite steady, and then in 2024 we had this real significant jump up and that was sort of corroborated with observations from local managers and hunters.”