{"id":9845,"date":"2014-06-04T07:34:02","date_gmt":"2014-06-04T07:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=9845"},"modified":"2014-06-04T07:34:02","modified_gmt":"2014-06-04T07:34:02","slug":"maggie-the-kakapo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2014\/06\/04\/maggie-the-kakapo\/","title":{"rendered":"The sad tale of Maggie the Kakapo, the victim of a landslide"},"content":{"rendered":"
Maggie the Kakapo<\/h5>\n

The Kakapo, according to Wikipedia<\/a> is a “species of large, flightless, nocturnal, ground-dwelling parrot endemic to New Zealand”, which is also known at the Owl Parrot.\u00a0 It has a number of unique characteristics, not least the fact that it is the only flightless parrot.\u00a0 It is a large and attractive bird, as the image\u00a0 (from New Zealand Birds Online<\/a>) below shows:<\/p>\n

\"kakapo\"<\/a>

New Zealand Birds Online<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

Whilst once being widespread across the forested areas of New Zealand, the Kakapo was poorly adapted to the changes and threats brought by human occupation, and by the predators that people brought with them.\u00a0 The result is that the Kakapo is critically endangered – in November 2005 there were just 86 individuals left.\u00a0 This has led to extensive efforts to increase the population, and by March of this year numbers had increased to 126.<\/p>\n

This number is so small that each bird is known individually (they are all named), and all are tracked using small radio transmitters.\u00a0 Thus, it is with sadness that the managers of the Kakapo Recovery Project<\/a> have reported that a Kakapo known as Maggie was killed on 20th May on Codfish island<\/a>.\u00a0 The cause of her demise was a landslide triggered by a period of heavy rainfall.\u00a0 Her body has been recovered from the debris – of course the transmitter meant that she was comparatively easy to find – and of course the telemetry data gives the time of death:<\/p>\n

\"Kakapo\"<\/a>

Kakapo Recovery Project<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

\"kakapo\"<\/a>

Stuff.co.nz<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

..<\/p>\n

At the time of her death Maggie the Kakapo was just 36 (when the life expectancy is over 60 years), so this is a sad loss of an important bird.<\/p>\n

The loss of endangered species to landslides is rarely reported – the only other example I can think of was the impact of landslides triggered by the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake on the wild panda population in Sichuan Province<\/a> in China.<\/p>\n

However, in another way such losses can be important.\u00a0 In the last week a major find of marine fossils has been reported in Chile<\/a>.\u00a0 Its likely that the exceptional preservation of these animals is the result of their burial by a landslide some 250 million years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Codfish island in New Zealand a rare Kakapo, known as Maggie, has been killed by a landslide triggered by heavy rainfall<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":9846,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[786,469,959,7],"class_list":["post-9845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-landslide-report","tag-animal","tag-featured","tag-landslide-report","tag-new-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}