I recently went away for a holiday and I will remember it mostly for my encounters with Kākā (Nestor meridionalis). Admittedly, I went looking for them, but I was more than rewarded for my efforts in the Brook Waimarama Sanctuary in Nelson, the Botanical gardens in Wellington, and on Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari.

The first white settlers in Aotearoa New Zealand, must have been singularly devoid of poetry to have named these sublime birds, ‘wattled crows’.