The last female kākāpō found on Stewart Island passed away this week. Solstice, the female kākāpō, died in Dunedin after being hospitalised for several months with cloacitis, sometimes called “crusty bum”, a disease that, unfortunately, has claimed a number of kākāpō over the years. Solstice’s story is one that’s close to me, because she was the first kākāpō we ever wrote about for New Zealand Conservation Stories back in 2020. She was discovered in 1997 on Stewart Island, four years after the l

How long does a kākāpō live? The honest answer is: we still don’t know. Kākāpō are among the world’s longest-lived birds, and several individuals alive today were already adults when researchers first began banding and monitoring the species in the 1970s. Because of that, no kākāpō of known age has reached the end of its natural lifespan yet. What we can say, based on what we’ve observed so far, is that some living birds are well over 50 years old, and that’s only the minimum we can confirm. Ini