Kakapo gets own seat on flight home

A three-year-old female kakapo will have her own seat on a commercial flight back to Codfish Island today after being hospitalised at Massey University for the past seven months.

Pearl flies to Invercargill in her own seat, then will be helicoptered to her home off Stewart Island and returned to the wild.

Pearl, one of 83 kakapo left in the world, was flown to the university's vet clinic last year after an abscess was found on her bottom, Massey vet Brett Gartrell said.

"This is the first time a kakapo has been hospitalised for any length of time. She spent a month in a pen on the island, but she wasn't getting any better, so she was brought up here. We never thought she would stay in this long.

"She has had several surgeries to remove the plant matter from her wounds. It was a particularly nasty place for the abscess, because every time she went to the toilet it would be showered with bacteria."

The abscess was found when Pearl was selected to move to Chalky Island last year. The abscess could have saved her life, as three other young females that were moved to the island died last year from a bacterial infection.

Pearl, who had been under the care of the New Zealand Wildlife Health Centre at Massey, has had a few problems during her stay.

"Her beak started to grow too long because of a combination of not browsing for her food and because there was a higher protein content in the food we were giving her.

"We had to trim her beak and decrease the amount of protein and supplements in her food. She also developed sores on her feet because of the surface, so we had to pad her perch and lay towels on the floor."

Dr Gartrell said Pearl showed her parrot personality during her stay and although she became quieter, she was still a wild bird.

"We only handled her two times a day to feed her, otherwise we tried to keep the disturbance to a minimum. She still growls a lot at us when we catch her.

"She is definitely a parrot. She chews her cage and she only has a cardboard box for a house because she chews that and we have to replace them. She climbs up on to the sink and has turned on the tap a number of times and flooded the room."

- NZPA