Pauly wanna crack you
N. Zealand's bizarre 'night parrot' brought back from the brink
The pudgy kakapo has wings but lives on the ground and is at times sexually attracted to humans. Only 126 left
Flightless, slow-moving and at times more sexually attracted to humans than their own species, it's small wonder New Zealand's kakapo parrot is on the verge of extinction.
But a mammoth conservation effort stretching back decades is offering hope for one of the world's rarest birds, lifting its numbers from about 50 in 1990 to 126 this year.
The plump, green kakapo -- the name means "night parrot" in Maori -- was once one of the most common birds in New Zealand, which had few land predators before European settlement in the early Nineteenth Century.
... an intense conservation initiative ... has cost tens of millions of dollars, to save a bird that those who have encountered it describe as endearing and full of personality.
"They can be quite grumpy," ranger Sarah Kivi said. "They display so much personality, which I guess you don't get from a lot of birds. They'll sit there and look at you and you wonder 'what are they thinking?'"
... The breeding program faced another hurdle when male kakapo became "imprinted" on their human handlers, meaning they saw them as more likely potential mates than female kakapo.
In the early days of the conservation effort, rangers even wore an outlandish rubber helmet dotted with dimples in an unsuccessful attempt to collect kakapo sperm when males tried to mate with their heads.
British actor Stephen Fry witnessed the kakapo's amorous antics first hand while filming his program "Last Chance to See" in 2009, when a kakapo named Sirocco took a shine to zoologist Mark Carwardine and began vigorously coupling with his scalp.
The resulting footage, which Fry described as "one of the funniest things I've ever seen", attracted almost four million hits on video-sharing website YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1vfsHYiKY. ...
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