My Life as Kea-Locator: Part I
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:33 am – Posted by Mandy | 2 Comments
Blogger: Kea-conservationist Corey Mosen
Last year my entire holiday leave was spent rooting out kea – on the wind, rain, snow and hail lashed mountains of St Arnaud, near Rainbow Ski field in Nelson. The trip below took place in the heart of winter
Keas make their homes in small mountainside burrows, and my job was to firstly find their nest, and secondly check if they were still being used.
The world's only snow-parrot - the kea, Photo: Andrew Walmsley
Not just a simple matter of ‘too roo, is anyone there?’ If the nest was kea-less, I had to do a thorough check of Sign of Lifes – namely, feathers, poohs, or kea nearby. Finally, I would do the sniff test.
I had been tasked with the job of converting a 1990s map into an up-to-date GPS map that would provide a good snapshot of our kea-population in this area, and a record of their breeding success.
The reality of doing this meant that we needed to put in lots of man-hours, walking up and down mountains looking for obscure holes in the ground where kea could be nesting.