They say that chaos breeds opportunity.  Well, at the moment it would seem that on Whenua Hou chaos is in fact breeding kakapo.  Organised chaos that is.  There are currently 34 people (I think!) on the island.  It's a mammoth undertaking to organise the workload, including despatching our very dedicated 20 or so volunteers every day. 

The majority of these volunteers are nestminders, despatched early every evening to far flung and not so far flung parts of the island to sit in their tents and monitor the movements of kakapo mothers as they go about their business, which at the moment is either incubating their eggs or feeding their hungry newly hatched chicks.  Supermum Cyndy is the queen of the island at the moment with her two chicks doing really well in their natural nest.  Every night a staff member heads up to her nest to weigh them and give them a good check over while she is away getting them a meal.  It's made much easier for us because she obligingly comes and goes about the same time almost every night.  Besides that there is a host of other night work for us to do.  Nests need modifying to allow better access for when they have chicks in them, eggs need to be candled to check their development and fertility and there is some shuffling of eggs and chicks around to different mothers to ease the burden on others.  Our gracious nest controller (currently the lovely Sharon Trainor from our office in Invercargill) stays up all night fielding radio and telephone calls from all of the nests to let us know what each kakapo mum is up to so that we can monitor their performance as mums and make amendments as required.  This could be the most exhausting job on the island perhaps, we have 26 nests so that means at least 52 calls to answer and that's assuming everything goes according to plan!  Suffice to stay she sleeps a fair portion of the day away when her night job is over.  Everyone here is working extremely hard, the day work is easing off as the mothers start to nest but the night work is on the up and will start increasing exponentially as more chicks begin to hatch and require our constant attention.  We have six chicks in total now on the island, four in nests, and two being looked after in the hand-rearing facility at the hut. These two will be farmed out to kakapo mothers shortly.

Stay tuned for more updates soon.