Word To Use Today: parapara.

The parapara is the stuff of nightmares. 

And who cures nightmares? 

Goats.

The parapara, you see, catches birds. It's mostly found on the smaller islands of New Zealand - Three Kings Island, and Hen and Chickens Island, for example - but it's sold in Garden Centres and in this way its malign depredations have spread throughout the country.

It's not that the parapara dislikes birds - or, conversely, that it likes them (if only as a light snack) - but the parapara carries super-sticky seed pods (yes, that's right, it's a tree) for eight months of the year. The idea is that the seed pods will stick to visiting creatures (large sea birds, mostly, which are big enough to carry the pods) and that these creatures will take the seeds off and accidentally drop them somewhere else.

Where it all goes wrong is that the seed pods are stuck very strongly to the plant.

This can cause a horrifying chain of death. Insects visit the parapara and get stuck to the pods. A small bird sees a juicy bug, alights on it, and gets glued on, too - and then, like some dreadful parody of a fairy tale, a hawk will see the bird struggling, and...

...it's horrible, isn't it? Even the birds that manage to struggle free will have their feathers so gummed up that they are unable to fly and are likely to fall easy prey to a cat or a snake.

The good news is that few New Zealanders enjoy looking out of their windows to find their gardens adorned with the corpses of small pretty birds such as kingfishers or fantails:


photo by Francesco Veronesi

 and so the parapara is becoming rare.

The other good news is that goats just yum them up.

So: should we rejoice in the parapara tree's demise? Or protect a few specimens?

Not easy, is it. 

Perhaps we should banish them to a few small islands populated by enormous sea birds.

Word To Use Today: parapara is a Māori word.