references
More traps than one can shake a stick at…
Mat Goodman
Kea have been historically abused on a number of charges for interfering with our way of life, but only recently have we attempted to reconcile and allow ourselves to accept and expect their behaviours where we coexist with them. In attempts to show our gratitude for their existence, and the other birds we treasure, we have established a number of ways to manage the pests and predators that pose a threat to their existence. Poison drops and land-based trapping systems have allowed certain areas to sustain specific populations of birds permitting their groups to remain without too much devastation. After all this effort it would seem that the birds would slowly begin to forgive us for what we have done to them in the past and respect that we are ‘trying’ to give them back what they once had, and most of them seem fairly comfortable with these measures we have in place… most of them.
My part of the story began when I found out that a certain bird was not accepting our means of predator control. Really, there is only one conspirator – the kea. The common understanding of the kea is that it certainly is intelligent. We have seen numerous examples of these birds examining and solving puzzles where the rewards were often a tasty, buttery treat. However, it was never known if the kea could actually develop the ability to do this in the wild. Studies attempted to prove that kea had the ability, yet all were inconclusive. During a stint trapping in Fiordland, a number of trappers and I became convinced that kea were sabotaging a number of traps by setting them off with sticks. Initially this was a nuisance as it meant that fewer pests were being killed, but I quickly discovered an opportunity which no one else had followed up on. I had seen the BBC and NHNZ examples of kea intelligence,
where the bird twists, turns and pulls objects to get a nut out of a strange looking perspex tower. But this was something different; kea were actually performing tool use without training, cameras and even without the soothing voice of David Attenborough. I say tool use, but without actually seeing what was happening or, more importantly, how it was happening, labelling it as tool use was a little ambitious. For all we knew at this time it could have been any one or any thing putting these sticks in the traps – crafty possums perhaps? When I came on the scene everyone believed that kea were doing it because they had often been seen messing around with the traps shortly after they had been serviced. Kea would follow along performing quality control. It surprised me however to learn that the opportunity of unravelling this mystery had not yet been pursued.
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