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Kakapo vs. Kiwi: New Zealand’s Strangest Birds
One is a fat, flightless parrot that smells like honey. The other lays an egg a fifth of its own weight. Meet New Zealand's two strangest birds side by side.
New Zealand had no land mammals hunting on the ground for millions of years, apart from bats. So birds took over the jobs that mammals do everywhere else, and some gave up flying. Two of the strangest results are the kakapo and the kiwi.
Head to head
| Kakapo | Kiwi | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A parrot | A ratite, related to emus and the extinct elephant birds |
| Species | 1 | 5 |
| Weight | Up to about 9 lb (4 kg), the heaviest parrot alive | About 3–7 lb (1.3–3.3 kg), depending on species |
| Can it fly? | No, but it climbs trees and parachutes down | No, its wings are tiny stubs hidden in its feathers |
| Food | Only plants: leaves, seeds, fruit, bark | Worms, insects, grubs, some fruit |
| Active | At night | At night |
| How many left | About 325 (2026) | About 70,000 in total |
The kakapo: a parrot that forgot how to fly
The kakapo is green, round and owl-faced, and it smells faintly of honey. When danger comes, it freezes and relies on camouflage, a strategy that worked against eagles that hunted by sight but fails completely against stoats and cats that hunt by smell. Males attract females by sitting in a bowl in the ground and making deep “booming” calls that carry for kilometres.
The kiwi: a bird that lives like a mammal
The kiwi has hair-like feathers, whiskers and nostrils at the very tip of its long bill, which it pokes into the soil to sniff out worms. It’s the only bird with nostrils there. It lives in burrows and has a body temperature lower than most birds.
Strange but trueA female kiwi’s egg can weigh about a fifth of her body weight. For a human, that would be like giving birth to a four-year-old child.
One is a parrot pretending to be a hedgehog-shaped bush. The other is a bird pretending to be a mammal.
Same problem, same fix
Both birds were defenceless once people brought stoats, cats, rats and dogs to New Zealand. The kakapo came closest to extinction: by 1995 only 51 were left. Today every kakapo lives on predator-free islands and has a name. Kiwi are much more numerous, but most kiwi chicks in the wild are killed by stoats and cats before they grow up, so conservation groups raise eggs and chicks in safety.
Who wins?
The kiwi is New Zealand’s national symbol, so it wins on fame. The kakapo wins on rarity, weight and the sheer strangeness of a nocturnal parrot that booms. Meet more birds that can’t fly in our Flightless Birds collection.
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