Aggressive campaigns. Trash-talking. Posters, costumes, and plenty of memes. These are all factors in New Zealand’s annual bird-of-the-year election, a contest meant to draw attention to the country’s native bird species. This year’s winner? A speedy little falcon known largely by its Indigenous Maori name: kārearea. Otherwise known as the New Zealand falcon, the bird was crowned bird of the year on September 29.
Run by New Zealand conservation group Forest & Bird, the annual contest began in 2005. In its first year, it attracted fewer than 900 votes. This year, the kārearea alone got more than 14,500 of the 75,000 votes that New Zealanders cast online.
Bird fanciers volunteer to run individual campaigns for each species. It’s easy to get the public engaged, Forest & Bird chief executive Nicola Toki told the AP. “This is not a land of lions, tigers, and bears,” she says. “The birds here are weird and wonderful and not what you would expect to see perhaps in other countries.”
Kāreareas are certainly wonderful: They can fly at speeds of more than 124 miles per hour. The birds are threatened in New Zealand. They get electrocuted on power lines, and they’re losing their forest habitat to development.
Last year’s winner was the hoiho, or yellow-eyed penguin. Its name means “noise shouter” in the Maori language.
More from World
Share a Link
- Click the icon above to copy the url link to your clipboard.
- Paste the link into the location in which you share assignments with students. Examples might include, but are not limited to Canvas, Schoology and Edmodo.
Google Classroom
- Click on the icon above to share the article with a class in your Google Classroom.
- Choose an action. Options might include creating an assignment or asking a question.
