Kaka So you hap­pen to live out west in the faul­ted hill-folds. One day a kākā lands on your deck rail­ing and win­ningly bounces along and back. It is look­ing at you. It is look­ing for food. Its head bobs up and down. It knows you have some.

Do you:

A) put out a sau­cer of nuts;
B) toss it some bread;
C) see if it will eat corn from your hand; or
D) ignore it (apart from get­ting a few pho­tos) and resolve to go to the Ōtari Plant Sale next year and get some bird-friendly nat­ive shrubs?

Per­son­ally, I’m all for (D), par­tic­u­larly when it comes to kākā. Wild anim­als that get famil­i­ar with humans have a way of even­tu­ally mak­ing nuis­ances of them­selves, espe­cially those as intel­li­gent as kākā or their cous­ins, the kea. And I’d rather the birds were thriv­ing because the nat­ur­al envir­on­ment we’ve recre­ated here had year-round food, shel­ter and safety rather than risk them becom­ing yet anoth­er human-com­mens­al or ‑para­sit­ic spe­cies.

But that’s just me, humour­less zealot that I am. Many people get a lot of pleas­ure from back­yard feed­ing of Wel­ling­ton’s now-abund­ant bird­life. And who could blame them – our birds are pretty cool.

Luck­ily then, Zeal­and­ia has issued “Feed­ing Birds at Home:
A Guide For Nature Lov­ers”, a handy PDF detail­ing how best to feed them.

I learnt that doing it right is a little more com­plic­ated than it first seems, but still quite doable. And that def­in­itely, my options (A), (B), and © above are ter­rible (fresh fruit or spe­cial par­rot pel­lets are best for kākā).

But I think I will need to hunt out some bet­ter trees and shrubs for around the house…