Meeting a kea at the Homer Tunnel

I’d been warned about the kea before I ever saw one. Everyone who drives the Milford Road mentions them at some point, usually with a story about a wing mirror or a windscreen wiper. I still wasn’t ready for what happened at the Homer Tunnel car park on a grey Tuesday in July, engine ticking as it cooled, waiting my turn for the single-lane, alternating-light crossing into the Cleddau Valley.

Three kea were already working the car park when I pulled in. One sat on the roof of a hire van, methodically testing the rubber seal around the sunroof with its beak. Another walked along a row of parked cars like it was inspecting them for a warrant of fitness. The third watched me from the top of a rubbish bin with an expression I can only describe as calculating. None of them were afraid. None of them were particularly interested in me, either — they were interested in what I was driving.

The only alpine parrot on Earth

Kea (Nestor notabilis) are found nowhere else in the world and nowhere else in New Zealand outside the mountains of the South Island. They’re the only parrot species adapted to alpine conditions, at home in snow, wind and thin air at altitudes most parrots would never survive. Olive-green with a flash of orange under the wings that only shows in flight, they can look almost drab standing still and then genuinely striking the moment they lift off.

They’re also, by most measures researchers have tried, unusually clever. Studies out of the University of Auckland and other institutions have recorded kea solving multi-step mechanical puzzles, cooperating with each other to get at food, and — famously, and expensively for the researchers — working out how to defeat supposedly kea-proof rubbish bins within days of encountering a new design. Wild kea have been filmed unzipping backpacks left unattended and opening car doors that weren’t quite latched. It’s not folklore. It’s documented, repeated behaviour, and it’s part of why the wildlife of Otago and Southland gets a mention on nearly every trip through this region.

Why your car is the target

The rubber fascination is real and it isn’t random destruction. Kea are neophilic — drawn to new objects — and investigative by nature, and a car offers dozens of small, chewable, pullable things: door seals, wiper blades, aerial bases, the trim around windows. A beak built to dig up alpine roots and prise insects out of bark makes short work of a wiper blade in under a minute. I watched the kea on the van roof peel back about four centimetres of seal before the owner came jogging over, and the bird simply hopped to the next car and started again.

This is why every piece of advice about the drive to Milford Sound includes some version of “keep your windows up and don’t leave anything soft where a kea can reach it.” It’s not an exaggeration for effect. Roof racks, cable ties, rubber floor mats left half out of an open boot — all of it is fair game if you park at the tunnel, at Milford Sound itself, or at stops like Monkey Creek for more than a few minutes.

An endangered bird, not a novelty act

It’s easy to watch a kea working over a bumper and forget that this is a threatened species. Current estimates put the population somewhere between 3,000 and 7,000 birds, and kea are listed as nationally endangered. The pressures are largely human in origin: introduced stoats and possums take eggs and chicks at nests that evolved with no mammalian predators to guard against; lead poisoning from old flashing and nails on huts and buildings across Fiordland National Park and other back-country areas has killed birds outright; and collisions with vehicles add up in places exactly like the Homer Tunnel car park, where the birds and the traffic share the same few square metres.

There was a bounty on kea until 1970 — tens of thousands were shot as a supposed threat to sheep, a claim that turned out to be wildly overstated. The population never fully recovered from that era, and it’s now trying to hold its ground against threats that didn’t exist a century ago.

Please, don’t feed it

I didn’t feed the kea at the Homer Tunnel, but I watched someone two cars along toss a chip out the window, and I understood the impulse. The bird is right there, obviously curious, seemingly asking for it. It’s also exactly the wrong thing to do. Human food gives kea none of the nutrition they need and plenty they don’t, and every fed bird becomes a bird that associates cars and people with an easy meal, which means more birds hanging around traffic, more birds getting hit, and more birds becoming aggressive beggars rather than wild animals doing what wild animals do. Feeding native wildlife is against the rules on conservation land for exactly this reason, kea included.

If you want a kea encounter that doesn’t put the bird or your rental car at risk, treat it like any other wildlife sighting: watch, photograph from a sensible distance, keep food packed away before you arrive rather than after a bird is already circling, and don’t leave the car unattended with windows down. On a Milford Sound day trip or a self-drive stop, that’s usually all it takes.

Other places you might meet one

The Homer Tunnel is the most dependable spot on a Queenstown-based itinerary, but it’s not the only one. Kea occasionally turn up around the car parks at Te Anau and along the road toward the Divide, where trampers head off on the Routeburn. In winter, small numbers show up scavenging around the base buildings at Coronet Peak and The Remarkables, which is worth knowing if you’re there for the ski season and wondering what that green bird eyeing your lunch actually is.

Arthur’s Pass, well north of here on the way toward Christchurch, is probably the single most famous kea location in the country and gets a mention in almost anything written about the species — but it’s a genuine day’s drive from Queenstown in the wrong direction, not a realistic add-on to a South Island trip based here. If kea are the reason you’re heading out on the Milford Road, the tunnel car park is where the odds are actually in your favour, whatever the weather is doing.

I ended up spending closer to twenty minutes at that car park than I meant to, waiting for the light to turn green and mostly just watching. By the time I drove through the tunnel, the kea on the van roof had moved on to a Toyota two spaces over, and the owner of the van was standing next to a wiper blade that no longer worked properly, laughing about it in the resigned way of someone who’d clearly been told this would happen and hadn’t quite believed it.

If you’re doing the same drive — whether self-driving or on a small-group day trip out to Milford Sound or a fly-cruise-fly day that skips the road altogether — believe it too. And if canyoning in the Routeburn Valley on a full-day canyoning trip is more your speed, keep an eye on your gear bag at the car park before you head down — kea have been known to take an interest in those too.