The kākāpō has acquired a reputation as a bird that ought to be extinct. Few would say it explicitly, but that is certainly the implication. It cannot fly, breeds infrequently, and responds to danger by freezing in place. Its most famous representative, Sirocco, became a celebrity by attempting to mate with a man’s head. People find it easy to love but rather more difficult to respect. Even affectionate descriptions often carry the implication that conservationists are engaged in a somewhat ridiculous effort to preserve an animal which has comprehensively failed at being alive.

I understand! I laugh at the kākāpō too. We live in a world where this is how we engage with animals: through memes, cute videos, subreddits devoted to them alternately being amusing or being “stupid”. I won’t say that enjoying a video of a funny bird is a moral failing. I do, however, think these interactions can mislead us when the animal’s wider context is missing. We learn the amusing habits and idiosyncrasies of a creature without understanding why they exist, and the joke becomes internalised as all we know of the species. The kākāpō is endearingly useless, and that’s just the way it is. Extinction is sad but perhaps inevitable for a creature supposedly ill-equipped to survive.

It is this last assumption that most irritates me. The kākāpō has survived perfectly well for a very long time. Now, having introduced the predators which hunt it and destroyed the habitat in which it lived, we point to its inability to cope as evidence of its own uselessness. Its adaptations are being judged against artificial conditions we ourselves imposed upon it, and we forget the conditions under which it experienced Darwinian success. The bird becomes responsible for its own disappearance. This is a very convenient understanding of evolution – particularly for the species which brought the cats.

Part of the problem is that specific traits are often treated as a general measure of how worthy an animal is. Intelligence, strength, speed, adaptability; these become marks in favour. Specialisation and apparent clumsiness count against it. This assumes that there is a universal set of qualities which makes an animal successful everywhere, and those qualities are defined by our own narrow aesthetic tastes. The reality is that evolution is typically capable of producing an animal that survives under very specific conditions, and natural selection cannot anticipate the arrival of a boat full of white people and their pets. Perhaps we will get the message when the escalating consequences of a changing climate begin to extirpate Homo sapiens from their own natural range.

The kākāpō evolved in a New Zealand without terrestrial mammalian predators. This was not the same as a world in which nothing wanted to eat it. Birds of prey presented a danger against which camouflage and stillness offered effective protection. Unfortunately, this same concealment is less effective against mammalian carnivores that hunt as much by smell as by sight. A behaviour which helped the bird avoid one kind of predator left it exposed to another.

Flightlessness needs to be understood in the same context. Flight is beautiful, but it is also costly. Those costs need to bring sufficient advantages for a species to maintain the ability. A flightless bird has not necessarily lost something that it needs, and it should not be considered a failure. Evolution produces compromises, and flight was not required for the kākāpō to survive. The bird was widespread across New Zealand, occupying an extensive range of habitats. Whatever its limitations, survival was not a problem.

Its breeding habits attract much the same criticism. Kākāpō reproduction is driven by abundant food, and in particular the mass fruiting of rimu trees. This means breeding seasons can be separated by years – incomprehensible for a primate with an insatiable need to reproduce. Once again, this is not an inherent failure. Raising chicks when food is plentiful makes them more likely to reach adulthood, and the kākāpō maintained its population in this manner for many hundreds of thousands of years. It is only when adults are dying in greater numbers that this slow breeding becomes retrospectively assessed as an evolutionary failure.

I say dying, but the correct word is murder. Polynesian settlement brought hunting, dogs, and rats. Kākāpōs were prized for their meat and feathers, and their range began to contract. European settlement dramatically accelerated the process. Forests were cleared, cats and stoats were introduced, and new browsing mammals consumed what remained of the food the kākāpō depended upon. These pressures explain rather more than “stupidity” or “uselessness” does – and still I see people persisting in the illusion that the competition between cat and parrot is a natural process, as though they had always inhabited the same environment and the bird had simply neglected to develop a response.

Even the footage most often used to demonstrate its reproductive incompetence could do with some context. Sirocco, the bird filmed attempting to mate with Mark Carwardine’s head during Last Chance to See, became ill as a chick and was hand-reared. Intensive human contact and limited socialisation with other kākāpō led him to imprint on people. His behaviour tells us something about the upbringing of one individual. Funny as it may be, it offers very little basis for concluding that an entire species is incapable of recognising a suitable mate.

There is a judgement concealed in this language of failure. An evolutionary failure has, presumably, failed something. Its extinction begins to look deserved, or at least like the appropriate conclusion to an unsuccessful existence. Conservationists are then cast as sentimental people refusing to accept the result. Human actions which caused the decline become part of the natural order, whilst human efforts to reverse it are treated as interference. This distinction is difficult to defend. Withdrawing assistance would leave introduced predators, altered habitats, and a depleted population in place. It would not undo our involvement or restore the conditions which existed before it. The consequences of our actions do not cease to be our responsibility simply because we decide that we no longer wish to address them.

There are reasonable questions about how much should be spent on a particular species. Conservation resources are limited, and affection for a charismatic parrot cannot settle every question of priority. The likely benefits of protecting it have to be considered alongside what could be achieved elsewhere. But this requires an assessment of costs, outcomes, and ecological value. Describing the animal as useless adds nothing.

The work being done is considerably more practical than the jokes suggest. Conservationists protect refuges from predators, monitor nests, provide supplementary food, and care for vulnerable chicks. The birds live in protected forests, where intervention addresses particular threats to their survival and reproduction. Most importantly, it is working. At the beginning of this month, it was announced that ninety chicks had survived the year’s breeding season. The official population has risen to 325 birds – a paltry number, but much improved from the scant 51 the modern intervention found when it began in 1995. Their future remains uncertain, but dedicated conservation work is beginning to reverse the fortunes of a species that we very almost exterminated.

None of this requires the kākāpō to become a more dignified animal. We can enjoy its peculiarities without treating them as an explanation for its disappearance. It does not need to impress us, or demonstrate an ability to survive everything we impose upon its environment, before its continued existence matters. We created the conditions which made it dependent upon assistance. To stop presenting that dependence as evidence of failure is the least we can do.