JOIN USThe passport was in a brightly coloured courier bag in the luggage compartment of a bus heading into the popular tourist destination of Milford Sound in the Fiordland region of the South Island, the Southland Times reported on Friday.
The kea, the world’s only alpine parrot, struck when the bus stopped and the driver was busy in the luggage compartment. When the driver turned around the startled kea flew away with the passport.
Police said the passport was unlikely to be located in the vast Fiordland rainforest.
The bird was last seen heading into thick forest and the British passport’s owner doesn’t expect to get it back.
“Being Scottish, I’ve got a sense of humour so I did take it with humour but obviously there is one side of me still raging,” said the man, who did not want to be named.
“My passport is somewhere out there in Fiordland. The kea’s probably using it for fraudulent claims or something. I’ll never look at a kea in the same way,” he said.
A replacement passport from the British high commission in Wellington could take six weeks and cost up to $250.
The kea, the world’s only snowline-dwelling parrot, is widely known as an inquisitive species that takes delight in attacking rubber items like windshield wiper blades.
Native to New Zealand, the birds are found only in or near South Island mountains, where they live in high-altitude beech fores.