Artificial Incubation and Hand Raising

This might be because the mother has too many eggs to raise herself or because a chick is sick or underweight.

Artificial incubation of eggs is an intensive process, requiring round-the-clock care and specialist skills to mimic the temperature and conditions of a kakapo nest.

Raising the chicks is not so difficult now that we have learnt about their food, temperature, humidity and social requirements. Initially we began with little information and encountered obstacles along the way, which was exacerbated by dealing with only a few eggs or chicks at a time.

"The more we can teach hand-reared birds about natural survival, the better they are going to be. We can't teach them everything their mothers can, but we can do lots all the same. Some pick up things a lot faster - others just want to spend more time playing with you." - Daryl Eason, Kakapo Recovery Programme worker.

Forty-nine kakapo have been hand-raised and returned to the wild and now comprise 39% of the total kakapo population. Most, if not all would have died early in life without rescue. Some have remained tame toward humans, but many are now indistinguishable from wild birds.

On one occasion, we cared for a chick in captivity right up to the age of five. Hoki became so famous and well-loved that a book was written about her by her keeper. She raised her first chick when she was 10, in 2002.

Hand-raised kakapo are now returned to the wild when 4-5 months old and raised in the company of other kakapo chicks, to avoid negative imprinting toward humans and improve their chances of breeding.

In the 2009 season, 26 out of 33 chicks needed to be hand-raised when the rimu crop failed.  Getting such a large number of chicks through to fledging was a huge effort for all those involved.  One of the main aims of our Supplementary Feeding Trials is to produce a pellet diet that the mothers will feed to their young when the fruit crop fails.   We came close to achieving this aim in the 2009 season - seven chicks were raised in the nest only because their mothers fed them the supplementary food.  We do not yet know why just a handful of the mothers passed this food on, when most had access to it.  Perhaps it is a learned behaviour, or perhaps the diet is not quite right yet.