The best way to keep an animal from going extinct is to never let it become endangered in the first place. Having a large population of a particular animal makes it much easier to conserve because you don’t need to worry as much about things like genetic diversity, finding breeding pairs, and keeping every individual alive and healthy at all costs.

Once an animal becomes critically endangered, however, it takes huge amounts of effort to help it recover. Conservationists in New Zealand are more than willing to go the extra mile when it comes to protecting one of the most critically endangered birds in the world, the Kakapo (Strigops habroptilus). This is a flightless bird that thrived in New Zealand up until around 700 years ago when humans moved in.

Once that happened, the population of these birds began to plummet until they reached their lowest levels ever of just 51 birds in the 1990s. To help protect this animal, conservationists set up three sanctuary islands where they were all brought so they could be kept safe from predators and aided in their breeding.

While keeping rats and other predators away was relatively simple, it is getting them to successfully breed has presented a major obstacle. The conservationists, however, were committed to saving this bird, and there was almost nothing that they wouldn’t try. The team has been largely successful, and they documented their efforts in a study published in PLOS ONE to help other conservationists working to save endangered birds throughout the world.

One of the first problems they had to deal with was the fact that their breeding cycle is somewhat rare. They breed only when the rimu tree masts (this simply means when they produce a lot of fruit). This can take up to five years to occur, which presents a big challenge. Dr. Andrew Digby works with the New Zealand Department of Conservation, and he spoke with IFLScience about their efforts, saying:

“One kākāpō female first nested in 1981, and then the next time was 2006.”

When they do breed, they will typically only produce 1-3 eggs, and of those, only around 40% end up hatching. This is due to a variety of factors, including infertility caused by a lack of genetic diversity, cold temperatures killing the eggs, and other birds fighting for the breeding grounds.

Conservationists are working to mitigate all of those issues, with the most difficult likely being the issue of genetic diversity. To combat this, they are working to supplement natural breeding with artificial insemination. Female Kakapos will often mate with multiple males (though not always) to help ensure the strongest male fathers the chicks.

So, when the conservationists note that a female has mated with a male, they will check their records to see whether that male contains the desired genetics. If not, the team will get to work trying to artificially inseminate the female, which is quite an ordeal.

First, they have to catch and collect semen from a male bird. This is a difficult process and involves performing abdominal massages on him (they tried other methods as well, but we won’t get that graphic here). Once the semen is collected, it needs to be rushed to the female since the health of the semen declines rapidly. The paper describes what happens once the female is caught:

“And their feet slightly pulled to both sides. Meanwhile, their head and wings were gently constrained using a towel to prevent wing flapping or other movements. After the procedure… the tail was gently articulated to simulate natural tail movements after copulation before they got rewarded and were released.”

While clearly this is not glamorous work, the study does show that their efforts are working. In 2019, the team had 142 birds. That year, they had to inseminate 12 females, which ended up producing 14 fertile eggs out of the total of 20 that they laid. This is a 70% success rate, compared to an under 30% success rate where artificial insemination is not used.

You can see the conservationists talking about some of the efforts they had to go through to successfully inseminate these birds in this video:

Their work is inspiring and shows that while humans clearly have the capacity to decimate many animals, they can also help to bring them back from the brink of extinction.

If you think that’s impressive, check out this story about a “goldmine” of lithium that was found in the U.S. that could completely change the EV battery game.