WELLINGTON (AP): The world's largest species of flightless parrot is edging back from extinction with five new chicks hatched in New Zealand in recent weeks and two more on the way, wildlife officials said on Monday.

The latest births of kakapos in southern New Zealand brought the population of the rare bird to just 91.

Emma Neill, a senior official of a Department of Conservation program to save the parrot, said even a small lift in numbers was ``awesome, especially considering these birds only breed every few years.''

The kakapo, which is native to New Zealand, last bred in 2005, when four chicks were produced.

Neill said all the kakapo eggs this year had proved fertile _ with two more due to hatch within weeks on Whenua Hou, a small island off southern New Zealand.

``In the last breeding season in 2005 the overall fertility rate was just 58 percent,'' she said.

Kakapo is a nocturnal parrot with finely blotched yellow-green plumage, a large gray beak, short legs, large feet, and relatively short wings and tail. It looks like an owl, or a giant flightless budgerigar.

The bird lost the ability to fly as it evolved because there were no ground level predators in the New Zealand environment to threaten the species.

But Polynesian and European colonization that started several hundred years ago introduced predators such as cats, rats and stoats that wiped out most of the kakapo. Surviving kakapo are now kept on small, predator-free offshore islands.

Conservation Minister Steve Chadwick said the latest chicks' safe arrivals reflected New Zealand's international reputation in species recovery programs.