Most of the juvenile kakapo highly valued by the breeders trying to bring the species back from the brink of extinction are now being dosed with antibiotics twice a day.
Conservation workers on Chalky Island, in Fiordland National Park, have penned up the juveniles so they can be fed the antibiotic
in food pushed down a tube into their throats.
Three of the juveniles - the world's rarest parrots - died last weekend. Researchers think they were infected shortly before or during transfer of 19 birds from the main kakapo refuge 120km away, on Codfish Island, near Stewart Island.
Only 83 kakapo are left so an emergency regime of hospital-style intensive care pens has been set up for the 23 birds on Chalky Island.
In one of those pens is Dobbie, the only adult to travel with juveniles in their move to Chalky Island. The 22-year-old male was being used yesterday as a guinea pig for a turkey vaccine being tried as a medium-term protection from the bacterium, Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae.
He will be watched for two days, and if there are no serious side-effects, four of the juvenile females will be vaccinated. The rest of the juveniles and eventually all 83 kakapo will be vaccinated.
Dobbie is thought to have already encountered and thrown off the disease, eryisipelas, which killed the young birds with infections that spread to their livers, kidneys and spleens.
The 15 remaining juvenile females on Chalky Island have been progressively penned since Tuesday afternoon and each fed antibiotics. When the course is finished their guts will be re-populated with acidopholus bacteria.
- NZPA
