Serenity_Innsmouth

"The kakapo ... is not an angry or violent bird. It pursues its own eccentricities rather industriously and modestly. If you ask anybody who has worked with kakapos to describe them, they tend to use words like "innocent" and "solemn", even when it's leaping helplessly out of a tree. This I find immensely appealing."
-Douglas Adams

Life isn’t easy when you’re one of the very last of your kind. You see, Serenity is a kakapo, a critically endangered flightless parrot from the island of New Zealand. There are only 211 of her kind left in all the world! And since they’ve adapted to be able to drive cars and fly airplanes it's become quite difficult to find any of them. To combat this terrible problem Serenity has trained herself to be an explorer, journeying through jungles fraught with danger and perilous mountains in order to try and find some of her own kind. Which is honestly really quite silly because we live in a day and age where the internet exists and it would really be much easier and much safer for her to just stay home and google them. But don’t tell Serenity that. She’s terrible with technology, she can’t even get her GPS to work right. So while attempting to find her lost kind she often gets lost herself. She ends up with some great stories though!

As a kakapo, Serenity has a few distinct advantages and disadvantages when compared to other birds. First and foremost is her lack of flight capabilities. There were no mammals on New Zealand for the longest time, you see, so the birds there dominated the ecosystem. The kakapo in particular stuck to the ground in order to avoid avian predators. This, however, made them quite susceptible to mammalian predation once the dogs and the cats and the werewolves came along with human migrants. She does have a highly developed sense of smell, though, one of the best of all birds. This is most likely due to the odor that kakapo’s produce to attract mates. It is a highly pleasant scent, even to critters of other species. This unfortunately also attracts predators. Such is life.



Did you know that the kakapo is a real life bird? Well they can't drive cars or work computers, but they are in trouble! With only 247 they are in very real threat of extinction. Click here to learn more about kakapo recovery efforts