The Last 154 Parrots_ New Zealand's Rarest Bird on the Brink _ Full Documentary

New Zealand. An island nation isolated from the rest of the world by thousands of kilometres of open ocean. Landscapes forged by titanic forces. Peaks carved by fire and ice. Rugged coastlines and primeval forests. Over millions of years these islands and neighbouring Australia became extraordinary evolutionary laboratories. Bizarre species found nowhere else on earth emerged and thrived. The kākāpō parrot is an extraordinary bird. Like all parrots kākāpō have a hooked bill but that's where the similarity ends. The kākāpō is the world's heaviest and only flightless parrot. It's also solitary and nocturnal. It's been described as the strangest parrot in the world. The kākāpō's booming call echoes through the night. These males are having a singing competition to attract a mate. It's a sound that has reverberated through the forests for millions of years but today it's becoming increasingly rare. We need to preserve completely unique animals like this which are like nothing else on earth. With less than 160 individuals left the kākāpō is one of the world's most threatened species. To learn how the kākāpō might be saved from extinction we join scientists and rangers and discover why this wonderful bird is only found in New Zealand. On the edge of the southern ocean lies one of New Zealand's most important wildlife sanctuaries. Just 14 square kilometers in size Whenuahau or codfish island is one of the last sanctuaries for the kākāpō. Just 154 are left and half of the population live on this island. At up to four kilograms the kākāpō is twice the size of a chicken. It's a giant among parrots but its size is no protection against introduced predators. In the 19th century European settlers brought rabbits to New Zealand. They soon became a destructive pest. Stoats were introduced to control the rabbits. For the flightless ground-dwelling kākāpō it was a disaster. Codfish island is one of the few places where these predators have been eradicated. The program to save the kākāpō is being spearheaded by biologist Deirdre Virco. It's good I think she's right between us at the moment. Deirdre leads the Department of Conservation's kākāpō recovery group. They're extremely unusual parrots. They're giant, flightless, nocturnal, heavy creatures walking around on the forest floor so they're very un-parrot like for a parrot. Look if I pop up I'll get her again. Deirdre and colleague Andrew Digby monitor the health of island kākāpō. Because the population is critically low an outbreak of disease would threaten the species survival. Codfish island lies at the southern tip of New Zealand exposed to cold winds roaring up from Antarctica. The woodland is dense and finding kākāpō is challenging. They're difficult to find but we have radio transmitters on every single kākāpō and that's what we use to track them. She's across certainly across that stream but I The kākāpō's green feathers are a very effective camouflage. You can get within a couple of meters and still really not see them and if they're up in a tree it can be really hard to pick where they are. If they're vocal or if they start moving that's a giveaway. Locating a kākāpō is one thing, catching it is another. For a plump flightless bird they're remarkably agile. Clambering around the trees they use their bill as an extra claw. The females climb right up into the top of the rimu trees in the breeding season to feed on the rimu berries to feed their chicks. I think she's feeling pretty safe there. Almost had her. Oh well, can't say we didn't try. Keeping track of each bird is key to ensuring the Another signal is received. This time it's on the ground. There he is. No, no, don't stop. He's right here. He's just on the ground by the astelia. It's going to run straight to you. Hey gorgeous boy. Hello. Oh he's beautiful. Each kākāpō has been given a name. This young male is Moss. We try and minimise handling as much as possible. We try and just handle them once a year to change their transmitter batteries and to give them a health check. It's something we don't want to do but we have to to maintain the health of the individuals and the population. They're absolutely stunning to look at. They've got that really intelligent parrot look about them but also the forward-facing eyes like a big owl. Kākāpō have also been called the owl parrot. As they evolve to become nocturnal, their eyes gradually move towards the front of their head, improving low-light vision. Like owls, kākāpō also have a distinctive circle of feathers around each eye. These facial discs act like radar dishes, collecting sound waves and focusing them towards the bird's ears. One characteristic they share with other parrots is intelligence. Each bird exhibits an individual personality. We have some which are quite friendly, some even actively seek out human company, others really run away from it. So there's a complete range of personality types it seems. Chip is one, two, four. Moss is one of the calmer kākāpō on the island. Is that transmitter string a good fit? Yeah. Moss was a young male, about seven years old. Got some beautiful green feathers down there. And so he's in really good shape. He looks fantastic. I think he's just molted and they're beautiful new feathers. Unlike most flightless birds, the kākāpō's wings still have a practical use. They use them to balance when they're climbing through the canopy. They're decent-sized wings, aren't they? Isolated on the remote islands of New Zealand for millions of years, kākāpō have evolved to live in the slow lane. We don't actually know for sure how long kākāpō live, but we think it's about 60 minimum. So he's got a long time to go. It's thought they may live a hundred years. If they do, it would make them the world's longest living bird. There are over 350 species of parrot in the world, but the kākāpō has taken a path unlike any other. What evolutionary forces created this extraordinary animal? A flightless giant, New Zealand's kākāpō parrot is one of the world's most unusual animals. To discover its origins, we need to go back millions of years, when parrots first evolved. The kākāpō's home in New Zealand is isolated from its nearest neighbour, Australia, by 2,000 kilometres of ocean. Australia couldn't look more different. It's vast, dry and flat. Over 800 bird species live in Australia. One group in particular has thrived. Early European explorers called it land of the parrots. Over 50 species are native to Australia. Unlike the bizarre kākāpō, they're more like we imagine parrots should be. Brightly coloured and active during the day, often congregating in large, noisy flocks. But despite Australia's parrots being very different to the kākāpō, all parrots evolved from the same dinosaur ancestors. 95 million years ago, New Zealand and Australia were part of the eastern edge of a supercontinent called Gondwana. This ancient land was tropical and damp, completely different to the outback of Australia today. Yet the bones of the kākāpō's dinosaur ancestors can still be found beneath Australia's dry, red dirt. Central Queensland has farms the size of small countries, and a tough breed of men who run them. Being a sheep farmer, you're always out on motorbikes mushering sheep, and so you see a lot of country and you see a lot of rocks. Like all farmers, David Elliott keeps a close eye on his livestock. But David isn't just a farmer, he's also a dinosaur hunter. Now I've been living out in this country all my life really, and I was about 30 years old when I found my first fossil, you know, and it's pretty unreal that you go 30 years and you don't really find anything in the way of a dinosaur fossil, and suddenly you're finding stuff everywhere. But once I worked out what I was looking for, it wasn't so hard to find it. Queensland's sheep country is also Australia's greatest dinosaur graveyard, and there have been some remarkable finds. David's first discovery was a leg bone from one of the largest dinosaurs to walk the planet, a sauropod known as the titanosaur. This enormous plant eater was up to 18 metres long, three and a half metres high at the hip, and weighed as much as 20 tons. Groups of volunteers undertake regular digs to discover what else could be hidden under the dry soil of Queensland's sheep country. And the reason we're at this site is because of this bone. That is the ankle bone of a sauropod dinosaur. It's in perfect condition, it's complete, and that's how I found it on the ground. There's virtually no rock on it, but not only that, all of these rocks are pieces of bone and they were there as well. So we're going to go back and keep looking. Farmers combine their sharp eyes with the expertise of scientists. The dig is being led by Dr Stephen Poripat from Queensland University. The rocks here are just as they were about 95 million years ago. It's a bit different to New Zealand. You look around here, it's totally flat. New Zealand, there are mountains, there are volcanoes, there are earthquakes. It's had a very, very active history. This is very passive. The rocks are still in exactly the same position as they were when the dinosaurs were walking around here. The first job at any dig is to rake the surface for fossils, however small. Searching for a dinosaur bone is really not much different than looking for anything really. You've just got to know what you're looking for. But to the average person, it looks like a rock. Dinosaur bone is like any other bone. It has bone texture. It's got bone marrow, it's got a veneer around the outside. It's got all those things. The first thing you're probably going to find is just a small piece, and that small piece tells you that there's something probably further down below the ground that you can dig. Steve? Yeah? I just hit it a bit with a shovel here, I think. All right. There we go. This is a piece of petrified wood. What this tells us, of course, is that this environment was totally different 95 million years ago. It would have been swamps, marshes, forest. Very different environment to today. A close look at nearby rocks reveals fossils of pine needles, twigs and leaves. There are ferns. Even early flowering plants are present. Millions of years ago, this plain was marshland, situated on the edge of an ocean. A tropical sea once stretched from the north of Australia into its centre. When they died, dinosaurs living along its shores were washed into the shallows. Their remains were buried, and over millennia, became fossilised. Over time, the elements have eroded the ancient seabed to reveal dinosaur bones buried for more than 95 million years. The Winton fossils are of international significance. A special facility has been built to house them, the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum. Months, sometimes years of patient work are required to reveal a fossil. All the workers are trained volunteers. It's like digging for treasure. Who knows what a rock might be hiding? The results of this work are spectacular. The museum houses an extraordinary collection of dinosaur bones, from the very small to the gigantic. Welcome to the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum. This is where we store all of our fossils waiting to be prepared. We've got a good decade's work here too. Most bones are from dinosaur species we can identify, but not all. The museum has recently unveiled a dinosaur completely unknown to science. This is our latest new dinosaur, called Savannasaurus. When we dug him, this is going back into 2005, and we had 17 pallets, four foot square pallets of dinosaur bones in rock, just solid rocks, just big piled up pallets of rocks. We worked on it for about nearly 10 years to get all of those bones out of the rock. Well, the importance of Savannasaurus lies mainly in how complete this dinosaur is. It's very rare to get more than, say, 5 or 10% of a sauropod skeleton. These were big, big animals. This animal, which had been about 12 to 15 metres long, but still, it was buried quickly enough that we were able to get 25% of the skeleton. All of these bones were encased in a big concretion, so we know they're all from the one individual dinosaur. And that means that we're able to get a very good idea of where Savannasaurus sits on the sauropod family tree. Savannasaurus's closest relatives seem to be from South America. Australia, by extension New Zealand, were connected to Antarctica, which was also connected to South America. Dinosaurs could freely cross across all three of those continents. We wouldn't know that if we only had one or two bones. Because we have so much of a skeleton, we can make really robust interpretations how these sauropods moved across the planet during the Cretaceous period. Would we ever find a dinosaur like Savannasaurus in New Zealand? I would anticipate we might. You don't know what's below the surface, and you don't know what you're going to find next, and it's just one of the fascinating things with looking for dinosaurs. But not all dinosaurs were enormous. One group had evolved to become small, light, and covered in feathers. Today, we call these small dinosaurs birds. This is a type of dinosaur called a theropod. Every single bird that we see in the world today came from a theropod ancestor. And we know from fossils found in Australia that birds were already living alongside theropods like this one here. That's the link. Dinosaurs are still alive today because all birds are theropods. Therefore, all birds are dinosaurs. Based on its heritage, the kākāpō is a living theropod dinosaur. DNA evidence now shows parrots likely evolved around 60 million years ago in eastern Gondwana, which today forms modern Australia. Their ancestors may have flown around the heads of the dinosaurs found at Winton. Their bones would have been small and delicate and may not have survived. But it's possible the remains of the kākāpō's earliest direct ancestor, the first parrot, lie beneath the red soil of Winton as well. And one day, a sharp-eyed farmer like David Elliot may discover them. If parrots originally evolved in Australia, it helps explain why there's such a great diversity living there today. But why did New Zealand's kākāpō evolve to be so different from its parrot neighbours? Soon after birds evolved, New Zealand broke away from eastern Australia. It was the start of a long journey that would isolate it for millions of years. New Zealand became an evolutionary laboratory, home to many of the world's most unusual species. In the central North Island, active volcanoes loom over the landscape. Beneath the slopes of Mount Ruapehu, the Rangataua Forest is home to an elusive creature that helps explain why New Zealand's kākāpō lost the ability to fly. With night falling, birds sing their last song and other winged creatures take to the air. Bats are New Zealand's only native land mammal. It's likely they island-hopped from Australia upwards of 16 million years ago. Until the arrival of humans some 800 years ago, New Zealand had no ground predators such as cats or rats. This allowed creatures here to evolve in unique ways. Flying takes a lot of energy. The short-tailed bat evolved to forage on the ground. They feed voraciously on insects and worms in the leaf litter, the only bat species in the world to do so. Bat scientists come out at night as well. Alison Beeth is the leader of a research team working to get a count of the short-tailed bat population. Nicola Torkey, the Department of Conservation's Endangered Species Ambassador, has joined her. Bats once populated New Zealand in the millions, but the arrival of humans saw numbers plummet. New Zealand has two unique bat species and the Rangataua Forest is the primary habitat for its largest colony of short-tailed bats. They're a small creature, the size of a mouse. The first objective is to trap one of the bats and use it to locate the rest of the colony. A large tree has fallen and created a gap in the dense forest. It's nice and open and the bats seem to just use this as a nice open flyway to come through. It's a good place to intercept bats as they fly from their roost to feed. Bats use a natural sonar system to navigate. Calls inaudible to the human ear are reflected from objects. It's a system that allows the bats to manoeuvre and hunt in the dark. But the fine net mesh is invisible to them. Yep, got one. Quick catch. Pretty quick. Almost out and he is out. He's quite a little biter. He's having a good chew on my finger. Nice work guys. Okay, he is 15.5 with the bat. With the bat. The bat is weighed and a tiny transmitter attached. The team is relying on this young male to lead them to his colony. Like the kākāpō, the survival of New Zealand's ground feeding bats hangs in the balance. The young male leads them to a large hollow tree. Bats could have been using this roost for centuries. When you find a roost tree it's a really magic experience because here it is a tree in the middle of the forest and inside is literally thousands and thousands of these incredible little bats. So you happy with that? Yep, I think that's great. There's still much to learn about this creature. Night cameras have revealed some of its secrets. One discovery is the unusual way they attract a mate. Short-tailed bats have an unusual behaviour called lek breeding. Males gather together and have long singing competitions to attract females out of their roosts. The best song wins. Kākāpō also rely on their voice to attract a mate. Just like the bats feeding habits, the kākāpō's mating behaviour evolved in the absence of ground predators. Before the singing starts they make a network of tracks leading to a bowl-like depression in the ground, a behaviour unique among parrots. The males undergo a change in the breeding season. They grow these air sacs in their chests and they actually get quite a lot larger and they can inflate these air sacs. They blow themselves up and they let their air out and make this booming noise which reverberates over a long distance. You can actually hear it a kilometre or so away. A male kākāpō may boom for up to eight hours a night for three months. New Zealand's parrots and bats illustrate how the absence of ground predators allowed many species to evolve on the forest floor. Alongside the kākāpō, many other bird species, including New Zealand's national emblem the kiwi, also evolved to become flightless. High populations of these birds proved being ground-based was an extremely successful evolutionary tactic. But around 800 years ago, disaster struck. Life for New Zealand's animals would never be the same. For 80 million years the islands of New Zealand were isolated. Apart from bats, there were no mammals. It was a haven for birds of every shape and size. Then disaster struck. Humans arrived. They brought with them rats, cats, dogs, pigs and stoats. Mammalian predators that would have a devastating impact. New Zealand's native animals had no defences. They were massacred. Since the arrival of humans, over 50 bird species have become extinct. These include a giant among birds, the tallest bird to ever live, the moa. Today, New Zealand's ground-living parrot, the kākāpō, is also close to extinction. Once they were so numerous that an early settler described them as falling from trees like apples. By the 1990s, the population was reduced to just 50 individuals. But despite the casualties, there are also extraordinary survival stories. Te Puhi a Noa, or the Murchison Mountains, are home to another flightless bird that has defied extinction not once, but twice. The takahē. Bones discovered by 19th century explorers included those of a large wood hen. With no reports of living takahē, the species was assumed to be extinct. However, in the 1840s, sailors found a living takahē. And they ate it. Three more birds were discovered, then nothing. Ranger Jason van de Wetering is a member of a conservation team following in the footsteps of a remarkable naturalist, Dr. Geoffrey Orbel. Orbel refused to believe the takahē was extinct. And in 1948, he ventured into this remote valley. April 1948, Geoffrey Orbel came up here. They were just exploring the edge of the lake here, and they found some footprints in the sand. And they didn't match anything that they knew of. They were too big for Wicca or Kiwi. So he actually took those measurements back into town and sent them off to experts around the country. And they couldn't agree on what it was. So that was pretty good evidence that there was an unknown bird in the valley. They were keen to get back in here again, but they had to wait for the snows to clear. So in November, they did the five-hour trek up the valley. They ended up up there and had to find a way down. And actually just on the beach around here on the side of the lake, they saw some quite large footprints. This time, they actually found the birds. And then that was proof that takahē did still exist, and history was made. After being discovered for a second time, the takahē population soon declined to the edge of extinction. Just head up towards Chris a bit more. Burwood Breeding Centre has developed a program to save the species. Adults can weigh over three kilograms. Takahē evolved over millions of years before mammalian predators arrived to New Zealand. By 1982, the takahē population had declined to just 118 birds. But today, there are over 300 birds, and the population is increasing. Takahē reproductive behaviour has been crucial to the success of the recovery program. They often mate for life. Chicks stay with their parents for the first year, greatly improving their survival rates. Today, another group of birds are ready to be released. Burwood is an integral part of the takahē program and its future, and the Murchison Mountains is their only wild population. The future of the takahē program is to get a second wild population set up, and just to get them back in their natural habitat in other parts of the country. These young birds represent the future for their species. A unique New Zealand bird returned from the brink of extinction.