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…