Coast Critters – Kākā vandal welcome

We had the most wonderful visitor to our garden last week. It was quite early in the morning, and I was watching a nearby tūī making a lot of noise as though it was somewhat alarmed. I went to go see if I could locate what was winding up the tūī, and I noticed a large darkish bird fly from one tree to another. 

It was a kākā! A close relative of the kea, the kākā is an endemic New Zealand parrot that were once common in the native forests throughout the country. These intelligent birds are classified as endangered but recovering, and they can be seen regularly at the nature reserves at Tiritiri Matangi Island and Tāwharanui Regional Park.

They also visit us occasionally in the suburbs of the Hibiscus Coast, and sightings of them are infrequent but seem to be increasing throughout the region.

Although they are often quite noisy and gregarious, our kākā visitor was silent and on its own. I am not sure why the tūī was so wound up about the big parrot– the kākā seemed to have no interest in the tūī at all. In fact, the parrot spent a solid two hours apparently obsessed with simply gnawing away at the trunks of various trees. At first, I couldn’t figure out what the bird was up to.

Kākā eat a variety of food items including fruits, nectar, flowers, nuts, and invertebrates. So, I thought that maybe the kākā was trying to excavate beetle grubs out of the trees, but after watching it for a while I gave up on that idea. The kākā was using its big, hooked beak to carve little horizontal grooves into a tree. It would carve a groove into one tree and then move to a new spot to start another one. It ended up with several little grooves on the go and it would keep visiting each groove every so often. I finally got a good view of what it was doing and realized the parrot was “milking” the trees for tree sap, lapping it up with its brush-tipped tongue as it oozed out of the wounds.

Kākā are one of the few birds of the world that regularly include tree sap in their diet and the only species in New Zealand known to do so. They are happy to do this on various species including lots of exotics. So, if you ever notice several little horizontal grooves in a tree, it may be the result of a sap-feeding kākā in the region. This foraging behaviour can sometimes be quite damaging, but kākā are welcome to come vandalize our trees anytime.