A bumper berry harvest has New Zealand's weird flightless parrot in a rare mood for romance

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — The world’s only flightless parrot species was once thought to be doomed by design. The kakapo is too heavy, too slow and, frankly, too delicious to survive around predators, and takes a shamelessly relaxed approach to reproduction.

But the nocturnal and reclusive New Zealand native bird ’s fate is teetering toward survival after an unlikely conservation effort that has coaxed the population from 50 to more than 200 over three decades. This year, with a bumper crop of the strange parrot’s favorite berries prompting a rare enthusiasm for mating, those working to save the birds hope for a record number of chicks in February, which would move the kakapo closer to defying what was not long ago believed to be certain extinction.

Kakapo live on three tiny, remote islands off New Zealand’s southern coast and chances to see them in the wild are scarce. This breeding season has launched one of the birds to internet fame through a livestreamed video of her underground nest, where a chick was expected to hatch this week.

The kakapo is a majestic creature that can live for 60 to 80 years. But they’re undoubtedly weird to look at.

Birds can weigh over 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds). They have owllike faces, whiskers, and mottled green, yellow and black plumage that mimics dappled light on the forest floor.

That’s where the flightless parrot lives, which has made its survival complicated.

“Kakapo also have a really strong scent,” said Deidre Vercoe, the operations manager for the Department of Conservation’s kakapo program. “They smell really musky and fruity — gorgeous smell.”

The pungent aroma was bad news for the parrots when humans arrived in New Zealand hundreds of years ago. The introduction of rats, dogs, cats and stoats, as well as hunting by people and destruction of native forest habitats, drove species of the country’s flourishing flightless birds — the kakapo among them — to near or complete extinction.

By 1974, no kakapo were known to exist. Conservationists kept looking, however, and in the late 1970s, a new population of the birds was discovered.

Reversing their fortunes hasn’t been simple.

One reason the kakapo population has grown slowly is that its breeding is, like everything about the birds, peculiar. Years or even decades can pass between successful clutches of eggs.

A breeding season only happens every two to four years, in response to bumper crops of fruit from the native rimu trees the parrots favor, which last happened in 2022. A huge food source is needed for chicks to survive but it’s not known exactly how adult birds become aware of an abundant harvest.

“They’re probably up there in the canopy assessing the fruiting,” said Vercoe. “When there’s a large crop developing, they somehow tune into that.”

That’s when things get really strange. Male kakapo position themselves in dug-out bowls in the ground and emit sonorous booming sounds followed by noises known as “chings,” which sound like the movement of rusty bedsprings.

The deep booms, which on clear nights can be heard across the forest, attract female kakapo to the bowls. Females can lay up to four eggs before raising their chicks alone.

Since January, admirers of the birds have had a rare glimpse into the process through a livestream showing the underground nest of 23-year-old kakapo Rakiura on the island of Whenua Hou, where she has laid three eggs, two of them fertile. So precarious is the species’ survival that the eggs have been exchanged for fake replacements while the real ones are incubated indoors. They will be returned to the nest just before they hatch.

Perhaps the only thing stranger than the kakapo is the lengths to which New Zealanders have gone to save it. Quadrupling the population over the past three decades has required their relocation to three remote, predator-free offshore islands and the micromanaging of the parrots’ every romantic entanglement.

“We do what we can to make sure we don’t lose any further genetic diversity,” Vercoe said. “We manage that carefully through having the best matches possible on each island.”

Each bird has a name and is monitored by a small backpack tracker; if a bird vanishes, they’re nearly impossible to find. With the kakapo still critically endangered, there’s little prospect of conservation efforts ending anytime soon, although those working with the birds are easing their hands-on management each breeding season.

The painstaking work to preserve the species might seem odd to outsiders, but the parrot is just one of many spirited and strange avians in a country where birds reign supreme. The only native land mammals are two types of bat, so New Zealand’s birds, which evolved eccentrically before human and predator arrival, have become beloved national symbols.

“We don’t have the Eiffel Tower or the pyramids, but we do have kakapo and kiwi,” Vercoe said. “It’s a real New Zealand duty to save these birds.”

In this photo provided by the Dept. of Conservation, New Zealand, a Dept. of Conservation staff member holds an egg for candling of a Kakapo egg on Whenua Hou Island, New Zealand, Feb. 2026. (Dept. of Conservation, New Zealand via AP)

In this photo provided by the Dept. of Conservation, New Zealand, a Dept. of Conservation staff member checks the size of a Kakapo egg on Whenua Hou Island, New Zealand, Feb. 2026. (Dept. of Conservation, New Zealand via AP)

In this photo provided by the Dept. of Conservation, New Zealand, a Dept. of Conservation staff member holds Kakapa chicks Tiwhiri A1 and Tiwhiri A2 on Anchor Island Pukenui, New Zealand, Feb. 2026. (Dept. of Conservation, New Zealand via AP)

In this photo provided by the Dept. of Conservation, New Zealand, Kakapo, Kohengi sits with her three eggs, on Anchor Island, Pukenui, New Zealand, Feb. 3, 2026. (Andrew Digby/Dept. of Conservation, New Zealand via AP)

GENEVA (AP) — A U.S. official focusing on arms control on Monday provided what he called new, declassified details of a Chinese underground nuclear test nearly six years ago and urged countries to press China and Russia to do more on nuclear disarmament.

Christopher Yeaw, assistant secretary of state for the bureau of arms control and nonproliferation, spoke to a U.N.-backed body after the last nuclear arms pact between the United States and Russia expired this month. That has ended limits on the arsenals of the world’s biggest nuclear powers and raised concerns about a possible new arms race.

Yeaw called for greater transparency from China and pointed to some shortcomings of the New START treaty, such as that it didn't address Russia's large arsenal of nonstrategic nuclear weapons — which counts up to 2,000 warheads.

“But perhaps its greatest flaw was that New START did not account for the unprecedented, deliberate, rapid and opaque nuclear weapons buildup by China,” he told the U.N.-backed Conference on Disarmament.

Yeaw said Beijing “has deliberately, and without constraint, massively expanded its nuclear arsenal” despite its assurances to the contrary. He lamented a lack of transparency about China's “endpoint” or goals.

“We believe China may achieve parity within the next four or five years,” he said.

Beijing has balked at any restrictions on its smaller but growing nuclear arsenal and denies carrying out such a nuclear test.

Yeaw met Monday with a Russian delegation and was to meet with Chinese and other delegations Tuesday in Geneva. U.S. officials have already held repeated meetings with partners, including nuclear-armed France and Britain.

In his speech, Yeaw cited an explosion detected at the Lop Nur underground site in western China as a magnitude 2.75 seismic event on June 22, 2020, based on information collected from an international monitoring system station in neighboring Kazakhstan.

“It was a probable explosion based upon comparisons between historic explosions and earthquakes,” he said. “The seismic signals were indicative of a single fire explosion, not typical of mining explosions.”

Yeaw said China has made it “difficult” for the international community to monitor its testing activities and that during talks, it rejected allowing seismic testing stations to be put at a comparable distance to Lop Nur that the U.S. allows near its test site in Nevada.

China's ambassador to the conference said Monday that Beijing “resolutely rejects the unfounded accusations” by the U.S. and lashed out at “continued distortion and smearing of China’s nuclear policy by certain countries.”

“The U.S. accusation that China conducted a nuclear explosion test is completely unfounded and is merely a pretext for resuming its own nuclear testing,” Ambassador Jian Shen said. “The U.S.’s practice of smearing other countries to evade international arms control obligations seriously damages its own international standing.”

If China conducted yield-producing nuclear explosive tests, it would severely tarnish its reputation as a responsible nuclear power, said Tong Zhao, a senior fellow focused on nuclear policy and China at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Some in the U.S. could cite that as justification for testing weapons again.

“There are American nuclear weapon scientists who genuinely think, no matter what other countries do, that the U.S. needs to resume nuclear testing simply to ensure its own arsenal would be reliable in the long run,” Zhao said.

President Donald Trump in October pointed to U.S. intentions to resume nuclear tests for the first time since 1992, but Energy Secretary Chris Wright later said such tests would not include nuclear explosions.

In his first term, Trump tried and failed to push for a three-way nuclear pact involving China.

Just after the New START pact expired, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. was “pursuing all avenues” to fulfill Trump’s “desire for a world with fewer of these awful weapons” but insisted Washington would not stand by while Russia and China expand their nuclear forces.

“Since 2020, China has increased its nuclear weapons stockpile from the low 200s to more than 600 and is on pace to have more than 1,000 warheads by 2030,” Rubio wrote on Substack this month.

The U.S. has expressed a willingness to pursue multiple diplomatic avenues over the issue — whether bilateral, in a small group of countries or in broader multilateral talks.

“We are looking to all of you to help encourage nuclear-weapon states like China and Russia to engage meaningfully in a multilateral process,” Yeam told the conference, which brings together some 65 countries on issues like nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Shen said China has consistently supported the goals of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, “always adhered” to the commitments of the five nuclear weapons states to suspend nuclear testing and “never” engaged in activities that violate the treaty.

He also suggested Beijing, which has been on a vigorous military buildup in recent years, still has fewer nuclear weapons than the U.S. or Russia and said it was “unfair, unreasonable and unfeasible” to demand China engage in three-way nuclear arms control talks.

“China’s nuclear arsenal is not on the same scale as the country with the largest nuclear arsenal, and the strategic security environment faced by China’s nuclear policy is completely different from that of the U.S.,” Shen said.

Associated Press writers Didi Tang and Ben Finley in Washington contributed to this report.

FILE - Christopher Yeaw, center, arrives to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing on his nomination to be an assistant Secretary of State, Nov. 19, 2025, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)