Kia ora, lovely linguists, and welcome to today’s episode of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents. We’re headed to beautiful New Zealand to explore the islands for today’s word: kakapo.

The kakapo, also known as the ‘owl parrot’ is a species of large, flightless, ground-dwelling parrot, native to New Zealand. With a face like an owl, the posture of a penguin and a walk like a duck, the tame and gentle kakapo is regarded as one of the strangest and rarest birds in the world.

The kakapo is a nocturnal, burrowing parrot that has green and brown barred plumage and well-developed wings. A combination of traits make it unique among its kind; it is the world’s only flightless parrot, the heaviest parrot, herbivorous, visibly sexually dimorphic in body size, and also possibly one of the world’s longest living birds. Sadly, the kakapo is critically endangered. The total known adult population is 142 living individuals, all of which are named.

The word ‘kakapo’ is Maori, and comes from ‘kākā’ meaning ‘parrot’, and ‘pō’ meaning ‘night’. The kakapo is associated with a rich tradition of Māori folklore and beliefs. The bird's irregular breeding cycle was understood to be associated with heavy fruiting, which led Māori to credit the bird with the ability to tell the future. They used to substantiate this claim with reported observations of these birds dropping the berries into secluded pools of water to preserve them as a food supply for the summer ahead and in legend this became the origin of the Māori practice of immersing food in water for the same purpose.

Māori would use kakapo skins with the feathers still attached or individually weave in 11,000 kakapo feathers with flax fibre to create cloaks and capes. They were highly valued, and the few still in existence today are considered ‘taonga’ or ‘treasures’. Indeed, the old Māori adage ‘you have a kākāpō cape and you still complain of the cold’ was used to describe someone who is never satisfied.

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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