About a tall, green, bounty-hunted bird

The kea is a large parrot, endemic to New Zealand. The birds have olive-green feathers (bright orange on the back and below the wings though) and are the world’s only parrot species that lives in the mountains. Kea (that's both the singular and plural term) are very intelligent. They have a novelty-seeking nature, which is one of the reasons why they are on the brink of extinction.

The curious birds are known for being very open-minded when it comes to food. They won't even reject junk food given to them by tourists. As a result of their gullibility, they even eat poison bait on occasion. Ironically, it's bait intended to control pests that are threatening New Zealand's bird species like the Kiwi and Weka, which breed on the ground and can’t fly.

Today, conservationists are raising the alarm after years of dramatic decline in kea population figures. Only between 3,000 and 7,000 birds are said to remain in the wild. Nonetheless, many New Zealanders consider the birds a pest.

The conflict dates back to the late 1860s when the big birds were blamed for attacking sheep. To "fix" the kea problem, the government came up with some kind of bounty system, offering beak money. According to New Zealand's Department of Agriculture, by 1970, an estimated 150,000 kea had been killed.

In 2017, the mountain-dwelling kea received a notable honor: the species was chosen for New Zealand's bird of the year. It received 7,311 votes, beating birds like the native wood pigeon, the kererū, which came in second with 4,572 votes, followed by the kākāpō with 2,554 votes.

With 168 bird species in total, many of them endemic, it's fair to say that New Zealand is a bird country. When Captain James Cook arrived on the island in the 1770s, he wrote that the noise of the birds was deafening. Today, around a third of the bird species are threatened with extinction and dozens more are on the endangered list.