Deep green, with a red forehead: that is the red-crowned parakeet of New Zealand. The Māori call it kākāriki, which means “little parrot”, and is also their word for the color green. It is a different kind of parrot: it spends a lot of time on the ground and scratches at the earth with its feet, like a chicken, looking for seeds and shoots. It runs fast and flies low among the bushes. New Zealand had no land-dwelling predatory mammals until people arrived. When rats, cats and stoats came, the kākāriki disappeared from almost all of the main islands and took refuge on small islands. Today, thanks to programs that eliminate those predators, it is returning to places it had vanished from. A second chance for a small but mighty survivor.