The Kākāpō Ejaculation Helmet
A true story of one very confused parrot, one very patient vet, and the strangest object in a national museum.
This may be the single oddest thing Wellington’s Te Papa museum has ever put behind glass: the Kākāpō Ejaculation Helmet. Yes — that is its real, official name, and yes, it is exactly what it sounds like.
The kākāpō is a large, flightless, nocturnal New Zealand parrot and one of the rarest birds on Earth. As of mid-2026 there are just 235 adults left alive — every single one named, radio-tagged and fussed over like a celebrity.
These mossy green parrots obviously need to breed to survive. The trouble is they’re spectacularly bad at it — and one bird in particular took “bad at it” to operatic new heights. Meet Sirocco.
Hand-reared after a respiratory illness nearly killed him as a three-week-old chick, Sirocco imprinted on humans instead of his own kind. The result is a parrot who is romantically interested in human heads and has precisely zero interest in lady kākāpō — awkward, given he carries excellent genes the breeding programme would dearly love to bottle.
🧬 A Hat of Condoms
Enter Department of Conservation vet Dr Kate McInnes and her gloriously deranged solution. The idea — borrowed from a gadget used on the Mauritius kestrel — was a helmet studded with little dimpled silicone receptacles to catch a love-struck male’s, ahem, contribution. Because a kākāpō is roughly the size and weight of a house cat (not a dainty kestrel), McInnes built hers onto a rugby helmet and remodelled it in her own backyard in Wellington. A hat of condoms, basically.
And then — this is the part the legends always get wrong — McInnes put it on her own head and let Sirocco have at it. For three nights running. As she delicately recalled, “he’s quite heavy, he goes on for a very long time, and he grunts the whole time.” Kākāpō mating is an endurance event: a single session runs close to an hour.
The popular version says the helmet failed because no volunteer could survive a giant parrot gripping their skull for 45 minutes. Not so. The vet wore it herself, quite happily — it failed for a far simpler reason: it collected not a single drop. McInnes says she’s still not sure whether it was a conceptual failure or just spectacularly unlucky. Either way it was quietly retired to Te Papa, where it now sits beside “Chloe”, a motorised decoy female kākāpō that also, gloriously, did not work.
📺 How a Dud Became a Superstar
Sirocco’s other claim to fame is the moment he went global. During filming of the BBC’s Last Chance to See, he clambered onto the head of zoologist Mark Carwardine and enthusiastically tried to mate with him — while comic legend Stephen Fry corpsed beside them.
“Sorry, but this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. You are being shagged by a rare parrot. He thinks you are a female.” — Stephen Fry
The clip went viral, and Sirocco rode it all the way to officialdom: in January 2010 he was named New Zealand’s Official Spokesbird for Conservation by then-PM John Key. He has his own (human-operated) social-media accounts, helped inspire the internet’s beloved Party Parrot emoji, and even starred in a documentary — Sirocco: How a Dud Became a Stud — that won a 2014 “Green Oscar”. Not bad for a bird that can’t get a date.
True to form, Sirocco occasionally ghosts everyone: his transmitter went dark in 2016 and he wasn’t relocated — alive and well, with help from some very good sniffer dogs — until 2018. He’s about 29 now, and still resolutely single. And please, Mr Fry, do play Professor Pennyroyal in a Mortal Engines sequel.
So a Department of Conservation vet once let an amorous parrot pummel her skull for three nights straight and got precisely nothing for it — except a permanent exhibit at Te Papa and a place in this blog post. Conservation is not for the squeamish.
Happily, the helmet wasn’t the end of the story. Researchers learned to collect kākāpō semen the un-glamorous way — gentle abdominal massage and electrostimulation — and it works: a 2025 study got a usable sample on more than 90% of attempts. Artificial insemination has since lifted the fertility of second-clutch eggs from around 29% to roughly 70%. And the first successful AI of any wild bird species? Also a kākāpō, back in 2009. Take that, helmet.
🦅 Kākāpō Facts & Trivia
🌲 Back From the Brink
The kākāpō is rated Nationally Critical, New Zealand’s most severe threat ranking. Once found the length of the country, it was eaten to the edge of oblivion by people and — far more devastatingly — by the rats, stoats and cats that came with them. By 1995 the entire species had collapsed to just 51 birds.
Decades of obsessive work by the Kākāpō Recovery Programme have hauled it back. Today there are 235 adults, plus a record-breaking crop of 2026 chicks waiting in the wings.
- 1894Conservationist Richard Henry rows hundreds of kākāpō to Resolution Island, New Zealand’s first island reserve. Heartbreakingly, the stoats simply swim across.
- 1975A male kākāpō found in Fiordland — the last of his population — is named “Richard Henry”. His genes become priceless to the whole species.
- 1995Rock bottom: just 51 birds left. The modern Kākāpō Recovery Programme begins.
- 2018Kākāpō125+ sequences the genome of (almost) every living kākāpō — a world first for any species.
- 2022The adult population peaks at 252 — the highest in over half a century.
- 2023Kākāpō return to mainland New Zealand at Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari — the first in roughly 40 years.
- 2026A record-smashing season: 106 chicks hatched, 93 still thriving — with 235 adults and counting.
The biggest year on record
After a four-year wait for the rimu to fruit (its mass “masting” is the only thing that puts kākāpō in the mood), the season roared in with the first chick hatching on Valentine’s Day on Pukenui/Anchor Island. It became the biggest ever recorded: 106 chicks hatched, 93 still going strong, smashing the old record of 73. The 106th was reached only when rangers tunnelled through the back of a clifftop nest perched above a 60-metre drop on Te Kākahu/Chalky Island. You can even watch the next generation hatch live on DOC’s Kākāpō Cam.
Long may they boom. The kākāpō recovery continues — kakaporecovery.org.nz
