Waiting game for mating game

It's kakapo mating time, but as Kerrie Waterworth explains, this is not your usual tale of the birds and the bees.

The pursuit of love is not easy for a male kakapo, though they are one of most highly sexed birds in the world, according to veteran New Zealand wildlife photographer and writer Rod Morris.

In the early 1970s, Morris accompanied Don Merton, of the former New Zealand Wildlife Service, on an expedition to find kakapo in Fiordland.

Merton took the first black-and-white photographs, while Morris took the first colour stills of the world's heaviest, only nocturnal and flightless parrot making its unique booming mating call.

In 1986, Morris returned to photograph the last remaining mainland kakapo, 13 males. All had climbed as high as they could to get away from stoats and were living on glacial mountainsides.

He found them extremely frustrated and trying to mate with sticks, branches, dead birds and even wildlife photographers.

For the past 30 years, recording the elaborate mating ritual of the kakapo, now all living on predator-free island sanctuaries, had become the "Holy Grail for wildlife photographers", Morris said. On February 18 last year, at 5.50am on a windy but dry morning on Codfish Island/Whenua Hou, a sanctuary 3km off the coast of Stewart Island, cameraman Scott Mouat cracked it.

"Cyndy, a female kakapo, had been coming and going all night long, and by 5.30am she came in close to Ox, the male, but then she left.

I thought that was it and switched off the receiver that had been picking up signals from Cyndy's transmitter backpack.

"Fifteen minutes later, Ox dashed off his bowl [a depression scraped in the dirt]. I thought he was just playing silly buggers as they do at that time in the morning, but when I swung the camera round I could just make out the shape of Ox mating and the outline of a female underneath," he said.

Mouat (35), a graduate from the University of Otago's postgraduate diploma in natural history film-making course with only three years' professional experience, is making a feature-length documentary on the kakapo. He had allowed four weeks to record the mating, which happened on the 26th night.

"Every night from 9.30pm to 6.30am, I stayed in my hide and waited. It was only about a metre and a-half square, so I had space to sit up, but that was it. I'd sit on a plastic case with a bit of foam on it, camera in front of me, legs tucked under the tripod and with the camera on all the time. I had a waterproof cover for the camera if it rained, as the hide was not always waterproof, but it was the wind that was the worry.

"I was lucky that there was only one night when it blew its heart out, and I was glad the hide was tied to the vegetation," he said.

Scott used a high-definition infrared camera, one of only two in the world, borrowed from Japan's national broadcaster NHK.

He said the kakapo were wary of lights.

"The kakapo are very scatty . . . I was only about five or 10 metres from the birds, so I had to stay perfectly still and try not to make any noise.

"I only had the image from the infrared monitor, the noise of the kakapo and the constant drone of seabirds overhead to tell me what was going on outside. . . .

"I had the continual beeping in my ear from a receiver picking up signals from kakapo backpack transmitters telling me which birds were where on the island, which helped to keep me awake," he said.

Rod Morris first heard the mating call of the male kakapo in Fiordland.

"Kakapo are unique in that they are the only lek bird species in New Zealand. That's where the normally solitary males congregate and boom across vast distances calling for a mate."

He said they would call for hours.