Imagine a world without the colour green: green in all its shades, mossy, lime, dark leafy green. Impossible? Well, Maori named the native parakeets, "kakariki" which literally means "little parrots" and due to their awesome green-ness the word "kakariki" also serves as the word for the colour green. Unfortunately eyecatching green kakariki are now gone from most of our lives.
The energetic birds used to fly in flocks, chattering away. They used to be common, so common that kakariki bones are the most frequent bone deposits between 1000 and 3000 years ago. In the 1800s, people stuffed mattresses with their feathers.
But human arrival to these islands started a slow decline in kakariki numbers that came to a shuddering collapse after the advent of Europeans and the mammals they brought with them.
You see kakariki don't build nests out of grass and sticks, but make use of holes in banks and holes in huge, old trees that form when a branch breaks off and rot begins. These are dry, cozy places to lay one egg at a time until there's up to nine. In years where there's more food, there are more chicks.