….found in Lake Paringa sediment from early 19th century
The South Island kōkako is an ancient bird once widespread in southern New Zealand forests. It was listed as extinct until 2013 when its status was reclassified as ‘data deficient’ by the Department of Conservation.
The South Island kōkako trust undertakes an amazing amount of work to try and locate this bird. You can read more about their work here. As part of our recent analysis of the Lake Paringa sediment core we detected DNA from this bird from about the 1800’s. You can read their blog about this here.
