Known to the Rendi people as the vaira and to naturalists as the moss parrot, this large, ground-dwelling bird has a broad, pale, owl-like face. It grows to about 58 centimetres, its plumage mostly a mottled brown-green, with forward-set eyes, a heavy pale beak, sturdy greyish feet, and a tail and wings strikingly short for its bulk. No other parrot is known to have abandoned flight so completely, and few birds of any sort live as long, some reaching 90 years of age.
Solitary by nature, a vaira keeps to one stretch of territory for years on end. Much of its feeding is done on the forest floor, though it also climbs high into the branches, and when it throws itself from a height the best it manages is a clumsy, wing-assisted glide to the ground. Everything it eats comes from plants: besides ferns and the bark, roots and leaves of trees, it takes a good quantity of seeds.
Breeding comes in the warmer months, and then only in seasons when food is plentiful. The male has no share in incubation or in bringing up the young; it falls to the female alone to sit on the eggs and, later, to feed the chicks. Somewhere between one and four eggs are laid in a shallow hollow, which she works over repeatedly both before laying and while she broods. Since finding food obliges her to be away from the nest for long spells, the eggs and chicks left behind are unusually open to attack by predators.
In the days before people reached the islands, the vaira was widespread in the Kelvan forests. That altered once the Rendi, the first settlers, arrived some 600 years ago. A flightless, ground-living creature made for easy hunting, and the Rendi valued it for its flesh and for its down, which they worked into warm garments; the dog and the rat that came with them hunted it too. By the time colonists from the mainland began arriving in the early 1800s, the vaira had already drawn back to the interior of the largest island and the wooded southern coasts. The newcomers only hastened its decline. Felling the forest took away much of its habitat, while animals let loose to graze — goats before all others — stripped out the food that remained. Cats, weasels and two more kinds of rat were introduced as well, and the bird now stood in real danger.
The first organised rescue came in 1897, when the islands' authorities backed a scheme by the naturalist Tobias Ruward to carry several hundred vaira to Cormar Island, in the Halane fjords, a place believed free of predators. The safety proved short-lived: inside eight years martens had made their way across, and in time destroyed every bird moved there. By the mid-twentieth century the vaira had all but vanished, a few holding on only in the islands' remotest places.
Across the years from 1951 to 1975, a newly formed wildlife agency mounted more than sixty search expeditions, most in the Halane country. Just six birds were secured, all male, and all but one died within months of being taken into care. A renewed drive in 1976 brought eighteen more vaira to light over the next two years, again without a single female. Then, on Vessig — a large island untroubled by martens, ferrets or weasels — a sizeable body of males was found, some 180 in all, and in 1983 females too were confirmed present. From that island's birds every later attempt to manage the species has grown.
On Vessig, though, feral cats set about the birds, and their numbers dropped steeply once more. To save them, the survivors were moved, between 1982 and 1998, to three sanctuary islands — Storn, Aldis and Petrel. Breeding, even so, proved hard to bring about. Rats turned out to be a major destroyer of the chicks, and too few young lived to offset the loss of adults. By 1996 the islands had produced at least ten chicks, only two still living, and the population overall had fallen to forty-four. Its gravity forced a thorough rethink of how the vaira was managed.
A new Recovery Plan came in 1998, and with it a dedicated panel of specialists — the Vaira Scientific Advisory Board — and a pronounced expansion of staffing. The campaign against predators on the three islands was intensified: cats had already gone from Petrel by 1984 and possums from Storn by 1989. Yet the birds' numbers began to rise only after rats had been cleared from all three islands and their management grew far more direct — carrying birds from island to island, putting out extra food for the adults, and hand-rearing any chick that was failing.
Five years into the plan, the recovery was keeping to its targets. By 2004 four more females had been raised, lifting the population as a whole to fifty-five, and for the first time there was cautious room for hope. By June 2021 the tally had reached 190 birds.
To this day the Recovery Plan governs the vaira's care. It sets three chief aims: to hold the loss of genetic variety across the population to the smallest degree possible; to keep, or bring back, enough fit habitat for a population expected to go on growing; and to ensure that local communities remain closely involved in protecting the bird.
