Smarter Traps, Safer Skies: how AI is helping kea in the Southern Lakes

High above the Southern Alps, the cries of kea echo across ridgelines and valleys. These playful, intelligent alpine parrots are a taonga species – unique to New Zealand and admired for their cheeky character. But alarmingly, kea are heavily threatened by predation and habitat loss. 

For Southern Lakes Sanctuary, protecting kea is not just about saving a single species – it’s about restoring balance across an entire mountain ecosystem. And now, innovation is changing the game.

The challenge of protecting kea

Kea face a double threat: they’re vulnerable to introduced predators like stoats, feral cats and possums. At the same time, their natural curiosity often puts them at high risk of injury when willingly interacting with the conservation tools and predator traps designed to protect them. 

Conventional predator traps are designed to kill efficiently – but kea, being endlessly inquisitive, can’t resist investigating. Sadly, this can lead to accidental deaths of the very species conservationists are trying to save. 

It’s a painful paradox: we need effective predator control to give alpine species like kea a chance, but we also need to ensure kea themselves are kept safe. And with an estimated population of fewer than 7,000 individuals remaining in the wild, which is just 10% of the population of kiwi, the race is on.

Enter AI and smarter trapping

Southern Lakes Sanctuary has been investing in innovative trapping solutions that rethink the way predator control works. One of the most promising developments is the use of AI-enabled AT520 traps created through a collaboration between FTP Solutions and NZ AutoTraps. These devices don’t just sit passively in the bush – they “see” what’s moving and use machine learning to recognise the difference between a target species such as a stoat, possum, rat and and a non-target (such as kea or other native species). 

Instead of triggering automatically, these smart traps only activate when a target species is correctly identified. That means kea and other native species can poke, prod, and play without harm, while possums and rodents face an unwelcome end. 

We trialled these AI-enabled AT520 traps in non-kea zones and the Kiwi Park in Queenstown before getting approval from DOC to include them in our Wye Creek project – a collaboration with Queenstown Climbing Club – and the results are promising. Not only have no kea been caught but they’re also improving efficiency for the team: self-resetting, tracking visits and activity (even without a catch) and sending real-time images and alerts to the office. This is drastically improving efficiency when it comes to trapping in remote terrain and enables data-driven decisions.  For a landscape as vast and rugged as the Southern Lakes, this kind of efficiency could be transformative. 

Trialling kea proof traps at Kiwi Park Queenstown

Collaboration is key

Innovation alone won’t save kea – it takes people. The Wye Creek network has been made possible through the shared vision and support of Queenstown Climbing Club, Whakatipu Wildlife Trust, Tūpiki Trust, DOC and Altitude Brewing.  

The Southern Lakes Sanctuary also works closely with groups like the Kea Conservation Trust, who bring in deep expertise around kea behaviour, monitoring, and advocacy. By combining local predator control at scale with specialist knowledge, the goal is to make the Southern Lakes one of the safest regions in New Zealand for all alpine species. 

Installing the communications gateway for this network at Wye Creek

What’s next?

Every time a kea takes flight – mischievous, fearless, and full of character – it reminds us what’s at stake. More than just a conservation icon, kea embody resilience, curiosity, and the wild spirit of the Southern Alps. 

The work, however, is far from done. In late 2025, phase two will introduce eight smart live-capture feral cat cages, tackling another major threat to kea and other taonga species. 

One thing is certain: if the call of the kea still echoes across these mountains for generations to come, it will be because people came together and got smarter about how to protect them. 

Want to learn more about these traps?

Listen to Phil Green, our Technical and Field Advisor, explain this network to Clare Concannon on RNZ here.