26 Jan 2017 - 8:44pm
A cash reward is being offered
for evidence of a New Zealand bird that's feared to be extinct.
26 Jan 2017 - 8:44 PM
UPDATED 26 Jan 2017 - 8:44 PM
A New Zealand charity is offering
5,000 NZ dollars ($A4,800) for sightings of a South Island kokako - but there's
a catch: The endemic bird species is most likely extinct.
The bird, with a distinctive
orange wattle under its neck, is unique to New Zealand and was once widespread
in the forests of the South Island and Stewart Island.
Before 2013 it was listed as
extinct, but after some credible sightings it was reclassified as "data
deficient," thus triggering the search for more information.
The hunt for what could well be
the rarest bird on the planet is urgent, the chairman of the South Island
Kokako Charitable Trust, Euan Kennedy, said on Thursday in a statement.
"If South Island kokako
still exist, there will be very few left. We need to locate them very soon so
that conservation has a higher prospect of success," he added.
The reward would be paid once a
panel of New Zealand's expert ornithologists agreed that the bird exists.
Trampers, bird-lovers, hunters
and all other backcountry users who think they've seen or heard the bird can
register the sighting on the trust's website.
As no photo of the bird exists,
the trust has released a digitally altered image of the North Island kokako to
give people an idea of what the South Island variety would probably look like.
In the early 1800s, the kokako
occupied large parts of the South Island but numbers declined quickly after the
introductions of cats, ship rats and stoats, and the birds were very rare by
the late 1800s. The last confirmed sighting was in Mount Aspiring National Park
in 1967.
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