How do you halt one of the world ’s most reasoning birds from being collide with and pop by cars ? You build them a gym , of course .
Conservationists in New Zealand have been installing kea " gyms " in a bid to unhinge theendangered alpine parrotsand keep their notoriously voracious minds occupy , in the Bob Hope that it will stop them from attend around roads where they are at risk of being hit by cars .
The insatiable wonder of the vastly intelligent fowl has meant that whenever humans have enrol their alpine human beings , the parrots have been drawn to them . unluckily , this often means that they have show too much of an pursuit in roads and railroad car that span their home ground .
Over the past few years , for deterrent example , construction workers in the Milford Sound region of the South Island have record the birds actuate traffic cones into the middle of the road at night , when the workers had go home .
expert thinkthat the birds were probably just playing around with the cones , but some have not rule out the possibility that the kea were designedly place them into the road in parliamentary procedure to make auto hold back , allowing the birds to beg pass tourists for food .
The problem with this is that not only are the bird swear on homo for solid food , but also that they are hanging around roads where they are likely to be in risk of being hit by moving vehicle . In fact , it is remember that XII of the endangered raspberry arehit and kill on the roadsin New Zealand every year , and so the gyms are part of the effort to distract the animals and keep them up in the James Jerome Hill and away from mass .
The induction dwell of a series of swing , ladders , climbing frames , and spinning floatation devices , and are changed on a regular basis to prevent the parrots from losing interest . So far , they seem to be a succeeder and have been used in other parts of the country for distract the birds from prejudicial forestry equipment as well as at a business leader plant in a bid to arrest the birds from deplumate up cars in the railway car park .
The Nestor notabilis – recentlycrowned victoriousin New Zealand ’s notoriousBird of the Year competition – is the populace ’s only truly alpine parrot , and lives in the mountains across a whopping 3.5 million hectares ( 8,650,000 acre ) of New Zealand . But despite this tremendous range , the wench are now nationally classify as endangered . In the past , it is thought that there were century of thousands of kea living along the noble-minded peaks , but now they number between just 3,000 and 7,000 person .
