An ambitious plan to translocate 100 kakariki (red-crowned parakeets) from Little Barrier Island to two other Hauraki Gulf islands as well as a mainland site means more people will be able to see the rare birds.
Conservation researcher Luis Ortiz-Catedral, based at Massey University in Auckland, has been studying a small population of translocated orange-fronted kakariki, which are extremely rare and critically endangered, on remote Maud Island in the Marlborough Sounds. He is now planning a large-scale translocation further north of their relative, the red-crowned kakariki. The two-pronged project is part of his doctoral thesis as a researcher at the Institute of Natural Resources, comparing how wild and captive birds cope with translocation.