Ok, but on New Zealand there were no land predators, only air and water predators, so digging a hole or staying still in the dense forest was a good survival strategy.
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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Am I a kakapo??
After reading the descriptions here, how DO they survive? I'm assuming on some island where they have no significant predators?
New Zealand, yeah
Saw a ~~tiktok~~ Instagram about a kakapo once. The phrase lives rent-free in my head: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJt_wHSCfxW/
Translated from german:
The kakapo is the fluffiest mistake evolution never deleted. The stupid Kakapo. Everything about him screams: "I was never meant to survive". He is fat, he can't fly and he walks like an old stool with wheels build out of moss.
In dangerous situations he just stands still. His survival instinct is "acting as if he im not there". His biggest enemy? Everything! Cats, dogs, rats even time...
Poor kakapo!
To quote Douglas Adams:
[The kakapo] is an extremely fat bird. A good-sized adult will weigh about six or seven pounds, and its wings are just about good for waggling a bit if it thinks it's about to trip over something — but flying is out of the question. Sadly, however, it seems that not only has the kakapo forgotten how to fly, but it has forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. Apparently a seriously worried kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it, whereupon it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground.
When there is no rock around, it can opt for Stephen Fry instead.
It was Mark Carwadine who got the honor of being shagged by a rare parrot, Stephen Fry was just spectating.
And on this note I can highly recommend the book "Last chance to see" that this TV show was based on. There also an audio book version read by Adams
Douglas Adams and Cawardine go around the world in the 80s to try to find almost extinct animals
When they created the tv show the plan was to revisit them, but a couple of animals went extinct in the meantime
Kakapo population is the only one that was somewhat positive, iirc
The aye-aye is also doing much better, mostly because the population size was severely underestimated at the time of writing.
And yeah, the book is amazing. I usually describe it to fans of his other works as somehow being his weirdest book, despite being non-fiction.
That book was his best book in his own rating. I agree.
Yup
I kept forgetting that the stuff actually happened. Because the humor just feels like straight out of h2g2
Relatable.