A maligned mountain monarch

Forest and Bird, Volume 17, Issue 1, 1 February 1986, Page 4

A maligned mountain monarch

Dr

, Conservation Director

Gerry McSweeney

Among all the special features of the high country long neglected by the public, one particular inhabitant stands out — Nestor notabilis — the noble kea. Maligned by some high country runholders and more recently by a few skifield owners, kea have suffered enormously since European settlement. We have played Russian roulette with the kea for far too long. New Zealand has too few native animals to permit perhaps our most magnificent bird to be frivolously killed and abused. Kea numbers have declined and their breeding range has been drastically reduced. The last thing our beleaguered Wildlife Service needs is another species to rescue from the brink of extinction and we therefore can’t afford to be complacent. Captive rearing within the confines of a steel cage is not a dignified future for this monarch of the mountains. Nor will the public stand by and see kea slowly dwindle and disappear from their favoured haunts in national parks and tourist resorts because the birds strayed once too often outside the park onto lands where their presence was not welcomed. Kea deserve immediate full protection and the implicit assumption of innocence before guilt. The vast bulk of kea would therefore be safeguarded and remain a source of infinite delight to mountain visitors and overseas tourists. In those few instances where kea can be proved to be damaging sheep they could be dealt with by Wildlife Service officers. The kea’s current partially protected status which allows a high country runholder to boast in national newspapers of killing a kea a week yet remain immune from prosecution is totally unacceptable to the public. A fair deal for nature in the high country and the kea in particular is long overdue.