Acknowledgements
We thank all members of the Kākāpō, Kākāriki Karaka, and Kakī Recovery Programmes–including the Ngāi Tahu representatives on the Recovery Groups for each of these taonga (treasured) species–for their support and inspiration for this manuscript. We are thankful to Dr. Robert C. Lacy who provided a friendly review of an early draft of this manuscript. We are grateful to Dr. Aisling Rayne, who provided helpful context and citations for Box 2. We thank Dr. Jennifer Sorensen Forbey for her feedback and support. We gratefully acknowledge Petrus Hedman for his kākāpō photo, Leonie Hayder for her kākāriki karaka photo, and LB for her kakī photo in Box 1. This work has been funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) Endeavour Fund (UOCX1602 awarded to TES) and was supported by the NSF Track 2 EPSCoR Program (OIA-1826801 awarded to Jennifer Sorensen Forbey and MA Matocq) and a SERDP award (RC-2702, awarded to JA Heath).