
We're Sequencing Every Member of the Weirdest Bird Species on Earth - HandleTheJandal
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/were-sequencing-every-member-of-the-weirdest-bird-species-on-earth
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Intermernet
The Kākāpō species has a peculiar ambassador in the form of Sirocco[0], the
individual who attempted to mate with Mark Carwardine's head.

> "He had to be raised away from other kakapo and this led to him being
> imprinted on humans. As an older bird, he still does not associate with
> other kakapo. This extends to the mating ritual of 'booming'; Sirocco booms
> in the presence of humans, rather than female kakapo. Sirocco is therefore
> seen as unlikely to be successful when it comes to breeding. However, his
> affinity to human beings means he has become an effective advocate for the
> kakapo species."

He's now New Zealand's "Official Spokesbird for Conservation". He even has his
own Facebook page[1].

If you want to help save these amazing birds you can go to the Kākāpō Recovery
site[2] and either donate, or adopt a Kākāpō.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirocco_(parrot)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirocco_\(parrot\))

[1]:
[https://www.facebook.com/siroccokakapo/](https://www.facebook.com/siroccokakapo/)

[2]: [http://kakaporecovery.org.nz/adopt-a-
kakapo/](http://kakaporecovery.org.nz/adopt-a-kakapo/)

------
bemused
The kākāpō truely is an eccentric creature - in the 80s Douglas Adams and
zoologist Mark Carwardine went out to find one for the BBC radio documentary
series "Last Chance to See". The chapter in its accompanying book is called
"Heartbeats in the night" \- even more fun to read than watching the
documentary[1] Carwardine did with Stephen Fry some 20 years later:

.. when eventually European settlers arrived and brought cats and dogs and
stoats and possums with them, a lot of New Zealand's flightless birds were
suddenly waddling for their lives. The kiwis, the takahes - and the old night
parrots, the kakapos.

Of these the kakapo is the strangest. Well, I suppose the penguin is a pretty
peculiar kind of creature when you think about it, but it's quite a robust
kind of peculiarness, and the bird is perfectly well adapted to the world in
which it finds itself, in a way that the kakapo is not. The kakapo is a bird
out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a
look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and
tell it that everything will be all right, though you know that it probably
will not be.

It is an extremely fat bird. A good-sized adult will weigh about six or seven
pounds, and its wings are just about good for waggling a bit if it thinks it's
about to trip over something - but flying is completely out of the question.
Sadly, however, it seems that not only has the kakapo forgotten how to fly,
but it has also forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. Apparently a
seriously worried kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it,
whereupon it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground.

By and large, though, the kakapo has never learnt to worry. It's never had
anything much to worry about.

Most birds, faced with a predator, will at least realise that something's up
and make a bolt for safety, even if it means abandoning any eggs or chicks in
its nest - but not the kakapo. Its reaction when confronted with a predator is
that it simply doesn't know what the form is. It has no conception of the idea
that anything could possibly want to hurt it, so it tends just to sit on its
nest in a state of complete confusion and leaves the other animal to make the
next move - which is usually a fairly swift and final one.

it's frustrating to think of the difference that language would make. The
millennia crawl by pretty bloody slowly while natural selection sifts its way
obliviously through generation after generation, favouring the odd aberrant
kakapo that's a little twitchier than its contemporaries till the species as a
whole finally gets the idea. It would all be cut short in a moment if one of
them could say, 'When you see one of those things with whiskers and little
bitey teeth, run like hell.' On the other hand, human beings, who are almost
unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also
remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

The trouble is that this predator business has all happened rather suddenly in
New Zealand, and by the time nature starts to select in favour of slightly
more nervous and fleet-footed kakapos, there won't be any left at all, unless
deliberate human intervention can protect them from what they can't deal with
themselves. It would help if there were plenty of them being born, but this
brings us on to more problems. The kakapo is a solitary creature: it doesn't
like other animals. It doesn't even like the company of other kakapos. One
conservation worker we met said he sometimes wondered if the mating call of
the male didn't actively repel the female, which is the sort of biological
absurdity you otherwise only find in discotheques. The ways in which it goes
about mating are wonderfully bizarre, extraordinarily long drawn out and
almost totally ineffective.

Here's what they do:

The male kakapo builds himself a track and bowl system, which is simply a
roughly dug shallow depression in the earth, with one or two pathways leading
through the undergrowth towards it. The only thing that distinguishes the
tracks from those that would be made by any other animal blundering its way
about is that the vegetation on either side of them is rather precisely
clipped.

The kakapo is looking for good acoustics when he does this, so the track and
bowl system will often be sited against a rock facing out across a valley, and
when the mating season arrives he sits in his bowl and booms.

This is an extraordinary performance. He puffs out two enormous air sacs on
either side of his chest, sinks his head down into them and starts to make
what he feels are sexy grunting noises. These noises gradually descend in
pitch, resonate in his two air sacs and reverberate through the night air,
filling the valleys for miles around with the eerie sound of an immense heart
beating in the night.

The booming noise is deep, very deep, just on. the threshold of what you can
actually hear and what you can feel. This means that it carries for a very
great distances, but that you can't tell where it's coming from. If you're
familiar with certain types of stereo set-up, you'll know that you can get an
additional speaker called a sub-woofer which carries only the bass frequencies
and which you can, in theory, stick anywhere in the room, even behind the
sofa. The principle is the same - you can't tell where the bass sound is
coming from.

The female kakapo can't tell where the booming is coming from either, which is
something of a shortcoming in a mating call. `Come and get me!' `Where are
you?? 'Come and get me!' 'Where the hell are you?' `Come and get me!' `Look,
do you want me to come or not?' `Come and get me!' 'Oh, for heaven's sake.'
`Come and get me!' 'Go and stuff yourself,' is roughly how it would go in
human terms.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrmi5UV6-wk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrmi5UV6-wk)

