To save its unique and rare birds, New Zealand is turning to AI and genetic research

New Zealand’s rarest birds have seemingly come back from the dead.

For decades, they were thought to be extinct until tiny populations were rediscovered, the holdouts that survived against the odds. There’s the kākāpō, a mossy-green parrot weighing up to eight pounds, making it the heaviest in the world. Then there’s the takahē, a large grassland bird with a red beak and blue ombre of feathers.

Now, New Zealand is undertaking one of the most ambitious conservation projects in the world to save them. It will only work if the country can develop the technology to do it.

Both birds cannot fly, which wasn’t a problem for millions of years. New Zealand (also known by its Māori name, Aotearoa) had no land mammals aside from bats, so the birds’ only predators were raptors that hunt from the sk