Birds
Kea
Nestor notabilis · also called mountain parrot, the clown of the mountains
The kea is a parrot that lives in the snow. It is found only in the mountains of New Zealand’s South Island, and it has become famous — and infamous — for a combination of extreme curiosity, playfulness, and problem-solving intelligence that gets it into constant trouble with people.
Overview
Keas inhabit the alpine and subalpine zone of the Southern Alps — tussock grassland, rocky bluffs, scrub, and the upper edge of southern beech forest — from the valleys to well above the snowline. They are the only truly alpine parrot in the world, active in freezing conditions and deep snow, and they roam widely, with young birds especially prone to turning up at ski fields, car parks, campsites, and mountain huts.
Intelligence and play
Keas are a benchmark for bird cognition. In captivity and in the wild they make and use tools, solve multi-step puzzles, understand basic probability, and cooperate — coordinating with a partner to operate apparatus that one bird cannot work alone. They are intensely playful, wrestling, tossing objects, sliding in snow, and performing aerobatics, and they have a specific play call that spreads playful behaviour to other keas who hear it, the clearest known case of contagious positive emotion in a bird.
Their exploratory drive is directed almost entirely through the bill, and in a landscape now full of human objects that means rubber seals, tents, boots, and the trim of parked cars are routinely taken apart.
Diet
Keas are opportunistic omnivores. Their natural diet is plant material — roots, shoots, berries, nectar, and the seeds of alpine plants — plus insect larvae dug out of rotting wood and the ground. They also scavenge carcasses, raid the burrows of nesting seabirds (shearwaters) for chicks, and, controversially, sometimes peck at the backs of living sheep to feed on fat and muscle, a habit that made them a target for extermination for a century.
Reproduction
Keas nest on the ground, in cavities among boulders, tree roots, or scree, from midsummer through winter. The female incubates three to four eggs and broods the chicks while the male brings food; chicks stay in the nest for around three months — a long, vulnerable period given the predators now present.
Threats and conservation
The kea is Endangered. After the end of the government bounty in 1970 and full protection in 1986, the surviving population still faces serious threats: introduced predators (stoats, possums, feral cats) that reach the ground nests, lead poisoning from the flashings and nails of old huts and buildings that curious keas chew, and mortality from human food, rubbish, cars, and 1080 pest-control operations. Conservation combines predator trapping around nest sites, removing lead from backcountry buildings, and public campaigns urging people never to feed keas.
Kea: common questions
What makes the kea so intelligent?
On problem-solving tests the kea performs at the level of great apes and matches or beats other clever birds. Keas make and use tools, can work out that a container more full of rewards is the better bet (a grasp of probability once thought uniquely human and ape), pull ropes and stack objects to reach food, and cooperate — two keas will coordinate to operate a device that needs both of them, and will wait for a partner. Their brains, relative to body size, are among the largest of any bird.
Why do keas destroy cars and gear?
Curiosity and play, not aggression. Keas explore the world with their long, hooked bills, and anything novel — windscreen wipers, roof racks, backpacks, tents, ski bindings, road cones — gets investigated, levered, and often dismantled. Young birds are the worst offenders. Car parks and huts in the Southern Alps that keas frequent are littered with shredded rubber trim, and feeding them (which is illegal) makes the behaviour much worse.
Do keas really have a "laughter" call?
They have a distinct warbling "play call," and researchers found that simply playing a recording of it causes other keas nearby to spontaneously start playing — chasing, tossing objects, doing aerial acrobatics — even with no other bird initiating. It is the first clear evidence of a "play vocalisation" driving positive emotional contagion in a non-mammal, comparable to contagious laughter in humans or play panting in some apes and rats.
Are keas endangered, and did people used to shoot them?
Keas are Endangered, with only a few thousand left. From the 1860s to 1970 the New Zealand government paid a bounty for kea beaks, blaming the birds for attacking sheep (some keas do pick at the fat around the kidneys of live sheep, but the scale was exaggerated), and an estimated 150,000 keas were killed. They gained full protection only in 1986. Today the main threats are introduced stoats, possums, and cats that raid ground nests, lead poisoning from old building materials the curious birds chew, and deaths from human food and vehicles.