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Vanessa Gay woke up to her cat Penny, a Maine Coon, whistling for something.
He had previously opened the door to a room leading outside for Penny to exit and assumed that a curious weka might have entered, as they were often in the garden.
But it wasn’t a weka, it was Ken the kea.
“The last thing you expect to see on a Sunday morning at 7 o’clock is a kea in your room,” Gay said.
“It was a great surprise.”
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Ken, a boisterous Kea who made himself known to residents in the coastal suburb of Glenduan earlier this year, has been ingratiating himself with residents of north Nelson for the past month.
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Ken the kea felt right at home on a property in Todds Valley, near Nelson.
He’s been strutting into houses, following children to school, winding up dogs, trying to land on people’s heads, and generally he’s been curious.
Observation reports from the Kea database show that Ken was seen by at least four different people at Marybank and Atawhai on Sunday morning.
There have been 14 recorded sightings of him in the area in the last month.
Gay said Ken got scared when he saw the cat and ran off. She closed the door and looked at him through the window.
“He played with my jandals, took things apart and tried to rip the rubber seals off the windows … he was in the garden, throwing things away and just having fun”
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School children stop to admire Ken the Kea on the way to Clifton Terrace School in Nelson.
While it’s a cool experience, Gay said he didn’t want to encourage her because he didn’t want Ken to become a residential bird.
“We have quite a few dogs in our community and their behavior is so safe that I was concerned that he thought he was a dog and tried to interact like a dog.”
Ken’s profile in the Kea database describes him as having turned up in various homes around East Nelson during the winter of 2020, sometimes becoming a nuisance.
“He can often be found staring out the windows, looking longingly at the people inside their houses, begging to come in. When he’s not on the deck of your house, he’s with the stranglers, rolling up your dogs, or sitting on the tractors “.
Julie Burt was in the garden, spraying weeds Sunday when Ken flew up to the roof of her house, then to the ground near her, showing off his “beautiful burnt orange plumage.”
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Annette Schleiss said that Ken the Kea was busy dismantling a very pretty orchid on his Todds Valley property.
He got caught between the camellia blossoms that had fallen to the ground and pecked at an orange that hung very low.
“Then he came and was attacking my rubber boots, he had his beak and head in my rubber boots.”
Ken was “a real character” and after a while he walked through a hedge towards his neighbors.
“It was quite surprising, I was excited afterwards, I had seen kea before, but certainly not here in Nelson like this.”
Todds Valley resident Annette Schleiss said Ken showed up in late August when he landed on top of her observatory and caused her two fox terriers to “go crazy.”
He flew to the top of a nearby patch of vegetation and crossed to a water tank. By then, Schleiss and her husband caught their dogs and locked them inside.
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Annette Schleiss said she had to lock her fox terriers inside when Ken the kea arrived at her Todds Valley property.
“That’s when the kea came across the patio and sat on the furniture, unzipped the cushions, and started pulling out the padding,” Schleiss said.
“The dogs were in the room, jumping up and down behind glass doors going ballistic.”
He returned two days later and plucked a blooming orchid, before trying to get into the garage.
Andrea Goodman of the Kea Conservation Trust said she had received numerous calls about Ken, who was entertaining a lot of people.
“He has been landing in people’s strollers and followed a group of children to school.”
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Ken the kea sits atop the blooms of a succulent agave on the property of Ian Craig and Annette Schleiss in Todds Valley.
Although difficult, it was best not to interact with him.
“Don’t feed him, try to ignore him and don’t let him in because we want him to learn to be a wild bird and hopefully fly back to the hills and join the others.”
It was clear that Ken had been fed, given how comfortable he felt with people.
Ken was a young man who could have come from the Richmond Ranges or the Kahurangi National Park. The Kea Conservation Trust appointed him a few months ago.
“It is very common at this time of year for groups of young birds to hang out while the adults are breeding at that time, so the young can get into mischief.”
Goodman said the sightings reported to Kea’s database would result in “fantastic citizen science.”
“If people see kea anywhere, especially banded birds, the database is a good place to record them.”
