| I used to live in Arthur's Pass[1] and have a few kea stories. Like the gangs of young males who would hang out by the public toilets and when a car pulled up to use them, egg each other on to undo the valve caps, then take turns depressing the tyre valves. Quite a few people ended up with two flat tyres on one side. Then there was the argument I had with my flatmate who hated smoking, when I kept finding my cylinder shaped ashtray that was outside tipped over with the contents spilled. I thought he was being a passive aggressive jerk, he thought I was nuts. One morning at about 6am, I heard a strange noise outside, and snuck out into the lounge, and saw two kea who had tipped my ash tray onto its side and were kicking it back and forth to each other on our concrete patio and having a great time doing so. (I had to make a very sheepish apology to my flatmate) Or the people I talked to on two separate occasions who had been victimised at the Deaths Corner lookout by a gang who would use one kea as a distraction - it would strut and preen and pose most engagingly and obligingly for the tourist taking photos, while the other gang members snuck up behind the poor tourist to rifle through their bag and steal anything interesting. The two people were talking to me because they'd lost their passports, last seen being dropped by a kea from a great height into the Otira River [2] beneath a highly unstable rockslide, and were rather hoping we could abseil down to retrieve them, which we had to sadly decline. Or the poor German who had to flee an alpine pass after kea stole the laces out of his boots, his tent pegs (that were holding down the tent he was in), all his food, oh and they'd also cut the guy ropes on his tent while they were at it. He was traumatised. All of this is why there's signs everywhere asking people to not, for the love of God, feed the kea. Firstly, they can become overly dependent on humans for food, which causes them to starve when there's minimal tourists in winter. Secondly, kea normally spend most of their day exploring and foraging for food. Human food, being wonderfully calorie rich by their standards, removes the need for foraging all day, thus giving them a lot of free time and excess energy to get into mischief. Love them to bits, apart from when they laugh at me when I arse over on a scree slope, and it's not overly misleading to describe them as flying monkeys with a built-in swiss army knife in the form of their amazingly dextrous and versatile beaks. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur's_Pass [2]: https://explorelaughtravel.weebly.com/blog/deaths-corner-art... |
I knew enough not to feed him. Kea are trolls. You don't feed the trolls.