Have you ever wished you could just fly away from the hectic pace of life? Away from people, away from stress, and into a place that's relaxing and isolated?
Well, humans don't have wings. But birds do. And new research shows that a famously reclusive bird species may have flown off into the mountains just to avoid humanity.
Native to New Zealand, keas are highly endangered. Nowadays, they're only found in the mountains of New Zealand, but fossil records show that they were once more widespread and didn't strictly limit themselves to alpine areas.
Researchers think they've figured out the story.
Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand analyzed keas, along with similar related birds, and found that there's no genomic reason for keas to live in high-altitude, mountainous areas.
"Physiologically, there is nothing to stop the kea from surviving at lower altitudes," wrote Michael Knapp, one of the lead authors. "It's a generalist. It will survive from sea level to alpine."
While Knapp acknowledges that it's speculative, the hypothesis is that keas fled from non-alpine areas because of human encroachment.
"What distinguishes the alpine habitat from the New Zealand lower-lying open habitats?" he asked. "[There] are usually heavily anthropogenic influences, agriculture going on and so on."
Like many parrots, keas have a mischievous reputation, and the New Zealand government had a 'bounty' on kea beaks for decades, right up until 1970. This cull would have killed about 100,000 keas. Nowadays, only a few thousand remain.
For the kea, a bird that's been hunted nearly to the point of extinction, it would seemingly make a ton of sense to fly away into the distant mountains and never return.
You can read the whole paper here.
h/t: The Guardian
