Rat Island (5 page)

Mueller voiced the bewilderment of explorers across the range, who had returned to their once-fertile mountains to find emptiness, and hunger. “In former times when camping near the head waters of any of the rivers the fighting of the kakapos amongst themselves, and the constant calls of the other birds around the camp often kept people from sleeping. This has all changed now. In the southern parts of the West Coast absolute stillness reigns at night, and there is nothing now to keep the traveller from sleeping except, perhaps (owing to the absence of birds), an empty stomach.”

As the birds vanished, Henry began penning articles on behalf of those “perfect fools regarding natural enemies,” and with blatant contempt for those now mindlessly obliterating them. “Some of our acclimatisation societies boast of the number of their importations, which may be roughly termed so many nuisances,” he wrote in 1889 for the
Otago Witness
, “and now that there is little else to shoot they seriously propose a gun tax, but have not a thought to spare for the preservation of our really valuable natives.”

Soon after, in 1891, with the kakapo's demise now imminent, a plan was written to set aside a last resort on Resolution Island. If there were to be a caretaker of Resolution Island, the ultimate candidate would most logically be someone with the skills of an accomplished boatman, capable of crossing the stormy seas of Dusky Sound, someone able to carve a home out of the bush and steeled to the solitude of life in the wilderness. That candidate, most optimally, would also be experienced at capturing kakapos and kiwis. Resolution Island's ideal caretaker described nobody so precisely as it did the eminent naturalist of Lake Te Anau, and nobody wanted the position more than he. No more sawing logs or herding sheep and tourists for a living. Richard Henry would be the bushman who saved the country's inimitable kakapo.

Henry's high hopes soon spiraled. When his unabashed advocate, Edward Melland, pushed for Henry's appointment, the bureaucracy pushed back. There was political infighting among egos; there was talk of abandoning Resolution in favor of Little Barrier Island, farther north. Bureaucrats sniped and both islands sat, while the birds of the mainland continued their tailspin.

Henry had finally glimpsed the life of meaning he'd long searched for, just in time to see it fade from his fingertips. After two years of waiting on the job on Resolution Island, he gave up. He sold his dinghy,
Putangi
, left behind his sanctuary at Te Anau, and headed north.

He stopped occasionally to share his theories of kakapo breeding behavior with the luminaries of academia, to cool receptions. “He thinks more of a classical name than about a curious & wonderful fact,” Henry wrote of his meeting in Christchurch with the biologist F. W. Hutton. “He seemed not to take a bit of interest in my story about kakapos but was very anxious to explain to me some straw splitting difference that shifted a bird out of one class into another.”

Henry continued north. He tried again at the Auckland Institute, offering his theories of kakapo behavior. Again came the cold hand of the ivory tower, with its polite but patronizing dismissal.

Richard Henry had reached the end of his wanderings. He found himself an aging, unschooled fix-it man with a peculiar passion for the lives of a few odd birds that few others cared to understand. There was nowhere else to go. Biographers John Hill and Susanne Hill would later write of what was to be Henry's final moment.

Quietly and rationally he carried out his plan. Certain that none would suffer by his action, that he had settled all his debts to the last shilling, and that his body would be unidentified, Henry crept shakily away like a wounded animal to die in a quiet corner apart. He stumbled across a bridge, somewhere, and scattered his last few shillings about, uselessly. Then he took out a six-chambered revolver and shot himself.

Next morning at first daylight, a man admitted himself into the Auckland Hospital. Richard Henry, the ultimate handyman and hunter, had somehow botched the job of killing himself. The first shot had left Henry standing there blinking, the bullet lodged benignly in his skull. He reconnoitered, put the gun to his head, and tried again. The gun misfired. Henry this time took the hint: “The remnants of superstition made me think I had better put it off to see what would turn up.”

A week later Henry received a telegraph from Melland, bringing news that he and his mates of the Otago lobby had finally pressured the government into putting a curator on Resolution Island. Two weeks after that, with ship fare wired by Melland and a resuscitated purpose in his heart, Henry was sailing south with hopes of a second life, as curator of Resolution Island, would-be savior of the kakapo.

T
O
THE
R
ESCUE

In the New Zealand winter of 1894, the steamship
Hinemoa
delivered Richard Henry to Dusky Sound. But for a transient community or two of gold miners and sawmillers, plus one eccentric old prospector, he was the sole human inhabitant of a water-bound wilderness spanning 150 square miles. He set up shop on a little island to the west of Resolution Island, called Pigeon Island.

Amid the rocky shores of Pigeon Island, Henry found a sandy cove tucked between two sheltering harbors, which would be his port in the stormy seas of Dusky Sound. There he built a house, raised high upon pilings to thwart the periodic stormings of rats. He built a boat slip and a shed and planted a garden in soils mixed with the ancient ashes of the moa-hunting M
ā
ori. The forests of Pigeon Island chimed with the birdsong of tuis, kakas, and bellbirds. A cave just beyond the tide line harbored a rookery of crested penguins, where Henry would collect eggs for breakfast.

With his favorite terrier, Foxy, and a young assistant, Andrew Burt, and once again comfortably at the helm of his sixteen-foot dinghy, Henry set out into Dusky Sound, beneath towering snowcapped mountains, through waters breaching with dolphins and whales, headed for the mainland in search of kiwis and kakapos.

He found the wild folds of Fiordland still alive with them. He found the signs of the kakapos' feeding, in the telltale husks and chewings of tussock. In the season of breeding, he felt the hillsides pulsating to the rhythm of their tympanic booming. On their first collecting trip, in May 1895, Henry's little team sailed seventeen miles to the foot of Mount Forster. They returned ten days later (nine of which rained on them) with twenty-six kakapos and a kiwi, and stocked Resolution Island with the first hopes for their future. The rescue was under way.

The rescuers settled into a strenuous routine. They would load
Putangi
to the gunwales with supplies for two-week stints of camping and kakapo catching, and out into the wild sound they would sail.

Henry was careful to study his barometer, to wait out the threatening storm. But once underway, the winds funneling down the fjords of Dusky Sound came quickly and vehemently, forever sending
Putangi
fleeing for shelter in the closest cove. “The steep mountains along the sounds lead the wind, and their many peaks tangle it up so that … it is very awkward for a sailing vessel,” remarked the understated Henry. “A north-west gale will come down Breaksea Sound, meet the real nor'wester coming in from the sea …, and then both go whirling and snorting down together taking a strong current with them.”

“Wet and tempestuous” became the standard report in Henry's weather diary. In his first month of residence on Pigeon Island, twenty inches of rain fell; in his first year in Dusky Sound, it rained on two hundred days.

Henry and Burt lived much of their lives in oilskin suits, and wishing they had better. “Our clothes are no use for this climate, and only a load of wet & misery,” Henry grumbled, “and the oilskin coat on top of the sweaty wool is a fit finish for a farce in clothing.” Seldom the complainer, Henry rued the lead weight of his soggy work boots, “pumping water after half a day in the wet moss & I am certain it would be healthier to go without but for the tender foot of civilization & stupidity.”

When Henry wasn't running from a drenching squall, he was shooing marauding rats from his head as he slept and forever swatting the ubiquitous biting sand fly of Fiordland. The maddening swarms of flies had him burning damp moss in his tent to smoke them out. There would come a time when the only salvation for his sanity was revenge. Henry had left his dog tied at camp and returned to find him under siege: “The poor fellow's head was swelled with their bites.” He coated his stove's chimney with grease and watched with sadistic glee as the flies glommed on by the tens of thousands. “I was all the evening peeping out through the slit in the door, and greatly enjoyed their difficulties,” he recalled. “The woodhens found that sandflies soaked in fat were just to their taste, and they kept up a tapping on the iron that sounded quite musical, because we were sitting in peace for the first time for days.”

Back at Pigeon Island, the comforts of home were short-lived. Henry would shave and dry his clothes and begin preparing for the next trip, baking bread and biscuits, preserving penguin eggs, and stocking his food box with stores of bacon and corned beef and potatoes and greens from the garden. Then out into the stormy passes he and Burt would sail again in search of flightless birds.

Upon landing ashore with promising habitat, he would muzzle Foxy, tie a bell to his neck, and, in a routine harking back to his halcyon days at Lake Te Anau, send him coursing and clanging through the bush. And somewhere along the trail, if all went well, at the end of a muzzled nose, would crouch the kakapo.

Henry would lift the bird, as soft as a swaddled infant, and place it in a wooden cage, sending Foxy afield again. Sometimes the team would capture a bird an hour. Other times they would go a day or more empty-handed. But eventually the
Putangi
would sail home to Pigeon Island bearing cages full of kakapos.

The kakapo, Henry quickly learned, was a solitary beast that fought when confined with others. Every bird demanded and thereafter got its own quarters, a fact somewhat comically illustrated by the little
Putangi
, valiantly battling the whitecaps, top-heavy with kakapo cages. Home on Pigeon Island, Henry would sometimes feed and fatten his charges in his open-air aviary, before sailing them one last time across the channel to their new home on Resolution Island.

Feeding the temperamental kakapo presented new problems. Ever the individuals, no two kakapos agreed on cuisine. After one of his early captives died in his care, Henry the host pained himself to satisfy the slightest whims of his guests. He hunted and foraged as a kakapo, stooping to harvest the bird's native foods. When the berry crop of the forest petered out, Henry offered bread and potatoes from the Pigeon Island pantry.

Henry's tally of transfers swelled. In July the team spent a week hunting new territory in Cascade Cove (where it rained every day) and came home with two dozen more birds. Three months into his work, seventy-five birds had been whisked out of reach of the predators. By October of that year, the count had surpassed two hundred.

B
OWERS AND BALLROOMS

Henry through his hunting and chasing grew to know the kakapo as no other naturalist of the field or pretender from academia had ever known it. Beyond the more commonly held facts of this singular bird—this solitary, nocturnal, owl-headed parrot that waddled like an elf through dwarf forests of scrub—the kakapo was still queerer by far than any could have imagined. In January 1898, while high on a mountain spine, Henry came upon a network of paths beaten firmly into the spongy earth. They ran for half a mile, interrupted at intervals by round depressions, as if the ground had been stamped by an elephant's foot. Henry measured the depressions at eighteen inches across. He had once imagined these as kakapo dust baths, a hypothesis that now struck him as absurd. No particle of dust stood a chance on a hill that received, by the sodden Henry's estimation, an inch of rain a day.

“So ‘dusting-hole' is, I think, therefore, a bad name,” Henry wrote. “ ‘Bower' would be more suitable.” To Henry these were the ballrooms of the kakapo in courting. It was from these ballrooms that the booming voice of the kakapo had serenaded him as he lay alone on those late nights at Lake Te Anau. He could now envision the underlying spectacle behind the mysterious crooning in the darkness. “I think that the males take up their places in these ‘bowers,' distend their air-sacks, and start their enchanting love-songs; and that the females, like others of the sex, love the music and parade, and come up to see the show—that is, if they can see the green and yellow in the dark; if not they can tramp along the pathways, listen to the music, and have a gossip with the best performers.”

Henry raised questions that hardly occurred to the curators of museum skins but would one day bear heavily on the kakapo's precarious future. Why, he asked, did the kakapo not boom and breed every year? “Can it be that they have curious social laws as mysterious as those of ants or bees—that they have a captain or queen to foresee a season of scarcity or abundance and order their conduct accordingly?”

The kakapo's sporadic breeding schedule, combined with a habit of laying but one or two eggs on average, suggested a species betting heavily on every chick. Which in turn helped explain their plummetting numbers in a countryside newly swarming with predators.

Henry began to realize the depths of the kakapo's vulnerability. Never mind that here was a big, meaty, flightless bird with a fetching scent and eons of ingrained innocence. Compared to its eggs and chicks, the adult kakapo was a veritable fortress. The mother kakapo, Henry discovered, as a habit received no help at the nest. At night, off she would wander, leaving behind eggs or helpless chicks. The father kakapo, Henry noted, “won't even keep off the rats while the mother is tramping away for food for her little ones.”