Is a CR badge a population number?

No. It is a category. The official assessment has the criteria and any count the assessors published.

Why does this site use Wikidata?

So every dossier can show a checkable category. Official assessments still live at iucnredlist.org.

Is the kakapo the example because it is a pet?

No. It is a photographed Critically Endangered bird with a public recovery story. Read the assessment, then the dossier.

Read the assessment, not the badge

Updated September 2026

Photograph of Kakapo (Strigops habroptila), recorded as Critically Endangered

What the badge is

Critically Endangered, Endangered, and Extinct in the Wild are categories. They are not head-counts. This catalog shows the category Wikidata records for Kakapo and every other photographed animal here. That is a filing fact. The kakapo dossier is a door into the record, not a substitute for the assessors’ page.

IUCN assessments use lettered criteria — A through E — about decline, range, small population, and quantitative analysis. Two animals can share a CR badge for different reasons. One is a collapse in numbers. Another is a range that would fit in a single valley. Quoting the badge without the criterion is how a catalog gets misread as a scoreboard.

What to open on iucnredlist.org

Find the species, then read the year of the assessment, the criteria string, and the population field if one exists. A 2010 assessment and a 2024 assessment are not the same sentence. If the page says the number is unknown, this site will not invent one. Population figures that appear in encyclopedia extracts can go stale; treat them as reported, then confirm.

What this catalog will not do

We do not copy Red List text. We do not flatten every animal into a pet-care FAQ. What “in crisis” means is the legend for three different facts: wild status, legal status, and invasive risk. Those are not interchangeable. If you only needed the badge decoded, you are done: confirm it on the Red List, then come back to the photograph and the dossier.

Quick answers

Is a CR badge a population number?: No. It is a category. The official assessment has the criteria and any count the assessors published.
Why does this site use Wikidata?: So every dossier can show a checkable category. Official assessments still live at iucnredlist.org.
Is the kakapo the example because it is a pet?: No. It is a photographed Critically Endangered bird with a public recovery story. Read the assessment, then the dossier.