These birds can provide endless entertainment when tramping in the Southern Alps often soaring high above the tracks calling out to each other with that distinctive call – always on the search for a tasty morsel and then keeping you awake all night as they clamber over the roof of tramping huts. Really sad to see these magnificent birds dumped on a picnic table.

As Keuleman's image shows these birds were once considered a pest for high country sheep farmers and the first job in New Zealand for my friend's father when he emigrated from England in the 1960s was to shoot kea for a bounty.