[Posted by Chuck Almdale, suggested by Lillian Johnson]

Berry nice to meet you: bumper fruit crop could lead to huge mating season for NZ’s endangered kākāpō
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/13/nz-kakapo-mating-season
After a four-year wait, the abundant fruiting of the rimu tree could inspire the world’s heaviest parrots to boost their population.

The Kakapo is unusual in many ways: flightless, world’s heaviest parrot, nocturnal, mate in leks (like grouse and manakins), long-lived (up to 80 years), highly endangered (down to 51 birds in 1995), live only on small temperate offshore islands of New Zealand, and mate every two to four years, when the berries of the rimu tree ripen. The trees may well have a bumper crop this year.

The Guardian not only lets you read their articles for free, without forcing you to give them your email address, credit card number or firstborn child, but they have a lot of other interesting articles on science and nature subjects, all of of which can be read for free. They also have ordinary news. When I see a link to an interesting article on NYT, WaPo, LAT and other $$$ sites, I check The Guardian. They often have it.

Have a thing for rare, hard-to-see nocturnal parrots?: Read about Australia’s Night Parrot, unseen by anyone between 1912 and 1979 and thought extinct, and still one of the world’s poorest-known birds. Link The finding and radio-tagging of a live Night Parrot in 2015 was deemed, “The bird-watching equivalent of finding Elvis flipping burgers in an outback roadhouse.”