Rat Island (4 page)

It got worse. Captain Cook and his cohorts, whose ships came infested with rats, brought cats to hunt them. It became routine at ports of call for the ship's cat to stretch its sea legs, saunter ashore for a stroll through the local woods, and make game of the island birds and lizards. It was hardly surprising that many cats, having tasted the wild life, never returned to ship. By the turn of the nineteenth century, feral cats could be found across New Zealand, from the coasts to the mountain snow lines.

So too came the rabbits. Introduced as game in 1864, the rabbits did what rabbits do, and within a decade New Zealand was boiling over with them. They mowed their way through the pastures of the vast sheep empires that had built New Zealand's new civilization. Sheep starved en masse, sheep farmers clubbed and killed rabbits by the millions, and still the rabbits kept coming, torching the countryside as they went. Rabbits might have ranked as the worst idea in the ecological history of New Zealand, if not for the ensuing harebrained scheme to rid them.

In their panic to save their sheep from their rabbits, the governing authorities of New Zealand in 1882 began shipping would-be rabbit predators. Three species of lithe, low-slung mammalian carnivores of the Mustelidae family—the ferret (or polecat), the weasel, and the stoat—were gathered up from Great Britain and turned loose on New Zealand. Frenetic, high-energy hunters at home in tight spaces, the mustelids were infamous for their unnerving mix of curiosity and giant-killing savagery. The stoat, at ten ounces, was practiced at grappling with rabbits five times its size, dispatching its prey with a penetrating bite through the back of the skull. But the little carnivore also came with brains, and the common sense to take advantage of any and all trusting songbirds and sitting ducks and grounded parrots that epitomized the New Zealand avifauna.

Buller, the high-profile bird enthusiast, voiced the naturalist's outrage over the mustelid liberations. “The legislature having rejected the proposed measure for prohibiting the introduction of polecats and other noxious animals into this colony, nothing now remains for us but to sound the note of warning before it is too late, and by directing public opinion to the subject, to mitigate the danger of our being overrun with one of the worst of predaceous vermin.”

All such warnings duly ignored, the New Zealand authorities went on shipping mustelids. And as predicted, the immigrants took to stuffing their larders with New Zealand's trusting avifauna, while the rabbits went on ravaging the sheep range.

To which the sheep lobby responded with the stupendous logic of introducing more foreign predators. They rounded up cats from town, tossing them like grenades upon their rabbit-ravaged fields. And onward the rabbits and stoats and cats merrily marched. Finally, in 1939, in a darkly comical parody of closing the barn door behind the missing horse, the bumbling new colonists of New Zealand, with their country in ecological tatters, enacted a useless bounty on stoats, offering two shillings a tail.

By then, half of the native bird species of New Zealand were gone, and nearly half of the survivors were circling the drain. By the 1890s explorers and collectors heading into the glaciated peaks and valleys of Fiordland were finding the supposed wilderness already ransacked. Those accustomed to traveling light and growing fat off the land now faced starvation in deserted forests. The birds that they had once so blithely gathered with guns and dogs and sticks, birds that had once eaten out of their hands, were no longer to be found.

“The Digger with his Dogs, Cats, Rats, Ferrets and Guns has nearly exterminated the Birds in the lower reaches of the southern rivers,” reported the explorer Charles Douglas, whose own crews had once pillaged their way through this virgin territory, piling up hundreds more birds than they could eat, and leaving the rest to rot. “The cry of the Kiwi is never heard and a Weka is a rarity. The Blue Duck once so green, is as carefull of himself as the Grey and the Robins are extinct.”

Those few species that endured the invasion owed much to their wings and good fortune to find pockets of predator-free refuge elsewhere in their shrinking universe. While those birds stranded in hostile territory and lacking the option of flight more often suffered the ultimate demise. And none more infamously than one tiny songbird named the Stephens Island wren.

T
HE
L
EGEND
OF
T
IBBLES

The Stephens Island wren was a tiny flightless species that within a year of its discovery was extinguished at the paws of one lighthouse keeper's cat named Tibbles. Thus reads the popular legend of what is commonly claimed as the only known instance of a single individual driving a species to extinction. What actually befell the Stephens Island wren was a bit more involved, if ultimately no less catastrophic.

In 1892 work crews came to build a lighthouse on Stephens Island, an otherwise uninhabited square mile of wilderness in Cook Strait, at the northern tip of New Zealand's South Island. In 1894, sometime after the lighthouse began operating, a cat belonging to one of the new residents started coming home with little dead birds in its mouth. An assistant lighthouse keeper and amateur naturalist named David Lyall skinned one and sent it to the ornithologist Walter Buller. The sight of the skin excited Buller, as that of a bird “entirely distinct from anything hitherto known.” The elated ornithologist wrote Lyall, “There is probably nothing so refreshing to the soul of a naturalist as the discovery of a new species.”

As the news of the curious new wren of Stephens Island spread, the celebrations turned sordid. There was fame and fortune riding on the head of the unique little bird. Buller, an ardent collector and profiteer, started plying Lyall for more birds. So did Henry Travers, a natural history entrepreneur and a noted broker of such rarities. The shrewd Travers secretly talked Lyall into diverting the specimens his way, and thereafter began offering them not only to Buller but to Buller's chief rival, the famously well-to-do bird collector Walter Rothschild.

The wren was truly something else. It had long legs and hardly any wings. Lyall, perhaps the only man since the ancient M
ā
ori ever to see the bird alive, sent word that it ran like a mouse and didn't fly. Taxonomists later examining the museum specimens found its flight equipment all but jettisoned. Its wing bones had shortened, its flight feathers been rendered aerodynamically unfit, its breastbone—to which its major flight muscles would have otherwise attached—withered to nearly nothing. The Stephens Island wren never flew; it ran in fits and starts, under cover of darkness. It had indeed become a feathered mouse.

Which on an island with a cat having nothing better to do made the wren a most appealing sort of game. Not that it was merely one cat doing the killing, as the story usually goes. There was at least a family of them prowling the confines of Stephens Island. (From which they eventually multiplied so profusely that the keepers started shooting them as pests.) Nor was the supposed villain even named Tibbles. (The name seems to have been invented for the sake of good copy.) Nor did he, or she, even belong to Lyall, who was merely the messenger.

Lyle nonetheless did write Travers of the bird's impending doom: “The rock wrens are very hard to get, and in a short time there will be none left.” To which Travers responded by raising the asking price in his pitches to Buller and Rothschild. And with the cats doing the killing, and the collectors and profiteers haggling over the carcasses, the little team of conspirators ran through what would turn out to be the first and last of the odd little wrens.

Within a year of discovery, the
Christchurch
Press
was reporting that “there is very good reason to believe that the bird is no longer to be found on this island, [and] as it is not known to exist anywhere else, it has apparently become quite extinct. This is probably a record performance in the way of extermination.” The
Press
may have been correct, or it may have been another year or three before the last Stephens Island wren stopped scampering about the island. But the tale fell decidedly short on the larger history of what had actually befallen the little bird.

Lost from the tidier bedtime story was the fact that “Stephens Island wren” was itself a misnomer. Fossils of the bird were later to be found all over mainland New Zealand. Stephens Island, it turned out, was not the birthplace of the evolutionary oddity but the final refuge of a once widespread bird driven to the very edge and, through the paradoxical misfortune of its discovery, witnessed at the moment it finally teetered off into eternity.

And so it was, after two hundred million years of splendid, decadent isolation and evolutionary experimentation, capped by six quick centuries of human occupation, that New Zealand limped toward the close of the nineteenth century a hollowed-out shell of life. It had been a siege of unprecedented rapidity and scale, the explosive finale of Oceania's great extinction.

Chapter 2

RESOLUTION

I
N
1894,
THE
year in which the cats and collectors of Stephens Island were chasing down the final few survivors of the wren that would be a mouse, the New Zealand parliament was otherwise concluding that perhaps something ought to be done about it. Perhaps it should secure a wild place where the surviving avifauna of New Zealand could huddle in safety out of reach of the plague of foreign predators now bearing down on them. Perhaps not only a place but also someone to usher them there, and to look after them as well.

For this purpose the legislature set aside an island off the country's southwest coast. Resolution Island was 47,500 acres of thickly forested mountains and sheer, forbidding shores, surrounded by a mile-wide moat of cold water. It was the largest of a hilltop archipelago in Dusky Sound, where the glacier-carved valleys of Fiordland dipped into the sea. Resolution was an unpeopled island in a lonely place. No roads led to Dusky Sound. The rare visitor came by ship or, less often, by foot, after weeks of intrepid cross-country tramping through uncharted mountain passes. Through centuries of sporadic intrusions, from M
ā
ori moa hunters to prospecting miners, the human footprint on Resolution Island had remained light. More critically, for New Zealand's last flightless birds, it had yet to be infected with the rabbits, stoats, cats, and dogs that stalked the mainland fauna.

Resolution Island, the government decided, would be a good place to harbor the last of its country's most critically walking wounded, chief among them the kiwi, little wingless cousin of the Australian emu; the weka, one of the two big flightless rails of New Zealand yet to be annihilated; and that incomparable waddling parrot of the night, the kakapo. Resolution was to be stocked with the dwindling birds from the mainland, to shelter them against the coming storm of invaders.

In 1894 the government allocated an annual salary of 123 New Zealand pounds, plus a small allowance for building a shelter in the howling wilderness of Dusky Sound, for the man whose task would be nothing less than to carry out the rescue of Fiordland's last flightless birds. For the task it looked to a homeless man.

T
HE
H
ANDYMAN

Richard Henry was adrift and penniless on the far end of the country, in Auckland, when the telegram reached him, announcing the opening for caretaker of Resolution Island. Forty-eight years old, limbs creaking from a life of hard knocks, Henry better fit the hobo's description than that of the one man in New Zealand to save the kakapo.

Henry's wearied soul was the victim not of rust but of long, hard mileage. He'd been five years old when his fortune-seeking father had shipped the family—seven children and a wife—from their homeland of Ireland to the boomtown of the Australian frontier. By the time the boat had docked four months later, Henry had watched both his mother and his infant brother succumb to sickness, to be buried at sea.

Australia offered the Henry family few sympathies. Richard's father found his hoped-for land of opportunity fierce with competition. John Henry tried storekeeping, engineering, surveying, and architecture on his way to going broke. Two years after landing his tattered family in Australia, he lost his six-year-old son to typhus. He borrowed money to move the family to the blooming port city of Warrnambool; a trip normally figured at a few days took three weeks after a storm blew the ship out to sea.

In Warrnambool, John Henry held together what was left of his family, turning odd jobs as a mechanic and a carpenter, slowly regaining his feet. His son Richard, torn between an inordinate yearning for the outdoors and a sense of his duty to help provide for the struggling family, melded the two impulses into a single impassioned pursuit. At ten years old he was plowing fields and shooting pigeons for food. He took to the woods and fields and swamps of the Australian outback, with a young naturalist's fascination and a gun. Richard Henry apparently spent little time in formal schoolrooms, studying instead Australia's Aborigine hunters. He emulated their techniques, spearing eels with bamboo reeds, climbing trees with bare feet and a tomahawk to reach the possum's lair. The budding bushman paddled the rivers in a bark canoe, fishing and gathering the eggs of wild fowl. By the time he was fifteen, he was bringing home kangaroo meat for the family table.

Henry was twenty-two years old when he took up working in his father's sawmill. Not long after, the saw errantly ejected a block of wood like a cannonball and struck his younger brother Alexander dead. For Henry it was the final blow to what remotely passed as a family life. He fled the painful memory of the mill, disappeared into the Australian outback, and took up wandering as his chief vocation.

Henry would surface now and again, as a jackaroo on a sheep station, as a hired hand in a backcountry timber mill. But he would invariably get his fill of the foul workmen's crews and steal away to the comfort of the wilds and the companionship of the Aborigine. “They were good-humored, jolly company, full of fun and activity and kindness towards each other,” he later wrote. “When I went home to the man's hut at the sawmill and into the surly, overworked, blasphemous company, it contrasted unfavourably with that of the happy darkies.”

Henry came to master the art of self-sufficiency by way of many trades, as shepherd, sawyer, carpenter, and boatman, but above all as bushman. Given his druthers, he would be out there among the wild animals, pondering their beauties in one moment if then bagging their bodies in the next.

When Henry pulled up stakes again in 1870, he went this time for more than the average Australian walkabout. He “crossed the ditch,” sailing the stormy waters of the Tasman Sea to the shores of New Zealand.

He landed to find New Zealand in the throes of its rabbit plague. The rabbits had by then officially crossed the line from sportsman's bright idea to national scourge, making fools of their liberators and a shambles of the sheep industry. And Henry the ever-handy bushman found quick if unfulfilling work in the Sisyphean task of shooting them.

Whenever Henry bored of rabbiting, he would wander on to a place or trade that better suited him. He did some boat building, some carpentry, more hunting and fishing, all ultimately leading him to open air and the wild creatures of the backcountry. Somewhere along the way, as he let on in his journals, he also met a woman, a woman he hoped to marry. Then, with merely a footnote dedicated to her subsequent rejection of him, Henry hurried on again in his retreat from civilization, in search of the next wildest place on Earth.

By 1880, Henry had retreated as far as men then went in New Zealand, to the southwestern corner of the South Island, on the shores of Lake Te Anau, gateway to Fiordland. To the east spread rolling pastures of sheep and cattle. To the west rose the white glaciers and crowded peaks of the Southern Alps, separating Lake Te Anau from the Fiordland coast, the last frontier in all of New Zealand.

Here he had finally found the place seductive enough to hold him. He had endless work at the sheep stations, where locals came to know him as Henry the rabbiter and Henry the shepherd. In the budding settlements he became Henry the carpenter and Henry the sawmiller. He learned the lake and practiced his sailing craft for pay, as Henry the boatman and Henry the guide.

The seasonal jobs financed Henry's true passion. He would finish his work, pack his sailing dinghy and dog, and shove off on naturalist sabbaticals to the west and wild side of the lake. He would lie by night in camp and listen to “the perfect din” of birds calling from the bush.

Henry's attentions came to narrow on the one bird dominating the symphony. From out of the hills came the haunting, gut-stirring vibrations of a bass drum slowly beating. Henry would set out into the hills, to creep within what seemed a few yards of the twilight percussionist, and release his dog. Then he would follow, scrambling through hill and brush to finally find his dog pinning the giant parrot of the night, the kakapo.

Henry beheld a soft and beautiful bird with feathers the foliage green of the surrounding scrub—an intricate plumage that camouflaged the kakapo as a beaked patch of shrubbery. The bird also came with a pleasantly conspicuous scent. Designed as a note to fellow kakapos, it was now received as a dead giveaway to the land's new hunters. Henry's dog could smell kakapo a quarter mile away; he caught them by the score and relished their tender meat. Henry could only shake his head at the bird's helpless plight. “They are the easiest things in the world to exterminate,” he wrote with foreboding. “A few wild dogs would clear the country in a decade.”

Henry would cradle the endearing kakapo in his arms and, likely as not, then kill and stuff it. He had become one of the smaller operators in a bustling trade of bird skins, selling off the bizarre New Zealand avifauna to stock the international museums of academia and the display cases of the wealthy.

The killing presented no great moral dilemma for Henry. The virgin hills beyond Te Anau still ran thick with kakapo and kiwi. And ultimately, Henry the collector reported to Henry the naturalist. With every bird he would chase or kill would come hours of admiration and contemplation. Before shooting, he watched and listened. After shooting, he gathered and dissected his victims' gizzards, recording their food habits as a good scientist might.

Such scientists, in Henry's estimation, were too rare. His degree came hard-earned, from days and nights of dirt time in the kakapo's kingdom; he questioned the wisdom of those pontificating from their professor's chair. “When you turn to a big natural history book for information,” he wrote, “you find all the fine names and straw-splittings about their classification and species, but hardly a word about their life history or the life of the young ones—whether the mother takes any care of them or feeds them, or if they care of themselves, and what they live upon, though some of those items are of the first importance.”

Though ignored by academia, Henry the naturalist became legend among the locals. The wealthy sheep magnate Edward Melland, Henry's part-time employer and steadfast champion, once said of his leading handyman and naturalist savant, “What he did not know about Lake Te Anau & the habits and habitats of its feathered population might truly be said to have not been worth knowing.”

In 1883, Henry saw the first signs that his bottomless well of birds had a bottom after all. The ferrets and weasels that had lately been loosed upon the rabbits were rapidly marching westward. “Some one has put ferrets across the Waiau, under Mt. Luxmore,” he wrote to those responsible at the Otago Acclimatisation Society. “I was trapping rabbits there and caught two ferrets, so that I think the end of the kakapo has already begun.”

For some time thereafter, Henry whistled past the graveyard. He continued his studies and hunts of the beloved birds whose doom he'd predicted. At home in his hut on Lake Te Anau, he would spend his evenings studying heavy works of New Zealand natural history. (That and fishing. He had rigged his line to a bell in the hut that rang when a fish took the bait.) By day he would fill the hut to the rafters with skins and stuffed specimens of the kakapos and kiwis and shorebirds he and his dog had hunted down in the endangered Eden of Te Anau.

To guard his skins while away, he had rigged a diabolical mousetrap, the gist of it recalled with morbid amazement by the wife of his employer, Katie Melland: “Dick took us to see his hut one day, and on entering I was met by an overpowering smell of decayed animal matter and quickly backed out.” The smell amounted to a month's worth of dead mice that had been accumulating in Henry's trap while he was away.

“He had a large, square, empty oil tin, with the top cut off, which he had filled three parts full of water,” reported Melland. “He made a tiny wooden wheel, like a treadmill, and fixed it across the top of the tin and baited it. The oil tin was sunk beneath the floor of the hut—which was on piles, only a hole cut in the boards to show the wheel. The mouse ran across the floor to the bait, stepped on the small wooden platform, the wheel revolved with the weight of the mouse, round it went depositing the mouse in the water, and was so nicely balanced that it set itself again ready for the next victim.”

By 1888, Henry was documenting the demise he had predicted. In the sheep station at Te Anau, where once he could count in one glance sixteen wekas and their broods of chicks patrolling the grounds like barnyard hens, all the wekas were gone. “There was no wanton destruction there, for everyone was friendly to ‘the poor weka,' ” wrote Henry, “and now that they are gone, everyone without a single exception regrets their disappearance.”

Henry watched as the ferrets decimated broods of wild ducklings. And he listened as a countryside once chiming with the calls of wingless birds fell silent. “On the west, from the mouth of the Waiau for 25 miles of beach, there are neither signs nor sounds of kakapo, weka, nor kiwi, where they used to be numerous, but there are plenty of ferret tracks on the beach. Up the creeks in the bush grey teal and blue duck were plentiful, but now they are all gone, and the black teal are rapidly going also, and in all probability will soon be simply a memory of the past.”

By the end of the 1880s, within just a few years of the mustelids' arrival in New Zealand, Henry's observations of the birds' demise in the lakes district were being echoed by explorers from across the country's final bastions of wilderness, in the mountains of Fiordland. Weasels and ferrets had been caught and killed within one mile of the sea, far from any point of release. The little predators had crossed the Southern Alps. They had outpaced by many miles of mountain terrain the rabbits they had supposedly been set upon. It raised the obvious question of what, if not rabbits, the carnivores were eating.

“The ferrets and weasels, no doubt, came up the dividing range with the rabbits, but as soon as they discovered our ground birds—our kakapos, kiwis, woodhens, blue ducks, and such like—they followed up the more palatable game,” wrote the surveyor George Mueller. “They will continue to thrive until the extermination of our ground birds, now begun, is fully accomplished.”