The Department of Conservation announced a recovery-era record: 325 kākāpō. Everyone called it good news. I wanted to know whether 325 is a big number or a frightening one, because it looked like both.
On 1 September, the Department of Conservation announced that the official kākāpō population had reached 325 birds. It is the highest it has been in the recovery era. Ninety chicks from the 2026 breeding season - the biggest season on record - made it to 150 days old, which is the milestone that counts as independence.
Every headline said the same word: soars.
I sat with that for a while, because 325 is a number I can picture. It is roughly one large school. If every kākāpō alive stood in a hall, they would fit in a hall.
So is 325 a lot, or is it terrifying? I think the answer is that it is only a lot compared to what it was.
When the Kākāpō Recovery Programme began in 1995, there were 51 birds. Fifty-one. That is fewer than the number of children in two classrooms, and it was the entire species. Getting from 51 to 325 took thirty-one years of work that mostly nobody watched.
Kākāpō make this unusually hard. They are large, flightless, green parrots that live a long time, and they do not breed every year. They breed in the years when the rimu trees fruit heavily, which happens irregularly. When it does happen, a female lays a small clutch of eggs, and every single one matters enough to have a name and a file.
That is the part that changed how I saw the number. Kākāpō are not counted in estimates. They are counted individually. Nearly every bird is known, named, tracked with a transmitter, weighed, and checked. The youngest chick of the 2026 season, Awarua-A3, has a name and a birthday and a recorded date on which it turned 150 days old.
You do not manage a species that way because it is charming. You do it because there are few enough birds that losing one matters, and because these ones only survive on predator-free islands and in fenced sanctuaries. They are not living where they used to live. They are living where we can keep them.
That is the honest shape of the good news: 325 is a real, earned, measurable win, and it is also a number small enough that the species could still be lost. Both halves are true at the same time, and the headlines only had room for the first one.
Here is the comparison that helped me. New Zealand has around five million people. If our whole population were 325, we would think about every single person completely differently. We would know all their names too.
There is one more thing I noticed, and it is not about birds. This announcement is the result of work started in 1995. Nobody who set that up got a headline in 1995. The people who did the early, unglamorous years of it were working for a result that would arrive decades later, when someone else got to say the word "record".
Most good news is like that. It is just usually reported on the last day.
Question for the reader
Try this before you read on. Without looking anything up, write down what you think the number should be before anyone is allowed to relax about kākāpō. One thousand? Five thousand? Enough that they live in ordinary forest again, with no fence and no transmitter?
Now think about what your number actually requires. More kākāpō need more predator-free space. Predator-free space means islands, or fences that cost money and need mending, or controlling stoats, rats and possums across large areas of land. Someone pays for that, every year, forever, out of the same pot of money that pays for hospitals and roads and schools.
So the real question is not "do you like kākāpō". Everyone likes kākāpō. The question is what you would give up to have more of them, and for how long.
And there is a version of this question with no comfortable answer. If keeping 325 kākāpō alive means every one of them lives inside a fence, checked by humans and weighed like a hospital patient - is that saving a species, or is it keeping a species? I genuinely do not know where the line sits.
If you had thirty-one years and a budget, which species would you start on, and how would you explain your choice to everyone whose favourite animal you did not pick?