Wellington kākā culture: life, death and relationality in a multispecies city

In the city of Pōneke Wellington, local ecosanctuary Zealandia has flooded the capital with a now thriving population of native birds, many of whom were locally extinct just 20 years ago. The charismatic kākā parrot with its shrieking call and playful demeanour is becoming an increasingly dominant actor in this new urban multispecies assemblage, winning the hearts of many human residents, and injecting itself into public discourse. Inspired by multispecies studies and more-than-human scholarship, this thesis seeks to explore the more-than-human actors and agencies that are co-constructing the city of Wellington. Thinking with the kākā, I investigate the ways in which a highly visible and charismatic native parrot is (re)configuring the urban environment, asking how are the kākā changing Aotearoa’s capital city? In focusing on and telling stories with the kākā, this thesis has contributed to the growing scholarship committed to revealing the nonhuman agencies at play in the world. It explores: (1) the formation of a local, post-release kākā culture in close relationship with the urban environment and the city’s conservation organisations (2) kākā- human feeding relations as sites of relational ethics (3) the co-production of materiality and narrative identity within kākā-tree encounters.

By putting multispecies studies in conversation with discourse analysis and political ecology, this thesis contributes to the growing scholarship on how we can approach nonhumans as agentic beings in our political ecologies of place. Moving beyond simply stating the importance of nonhuman agency and telling celebratory stories of nonhuman-human entanglement, this work demonstrates how people share and co-create urban spaces with nonhuman neighbours.