Kiore spread in advance of their hosts, multiplying exponentially, swarming over the virgin Aotearoan candyland—“a grey tide,” wrote the paleontologist Richard Holdaway, “turning everything edible into rat protein as it went.”
Survivors of Aotearoa’s invasion retreated to tenuous safety offshore. The myriad coastal islands of the island nation became the last refuge for the New Zealand snipe, for the sitting duck called the Auckland merganser, and for the dinosaurian throwback the tuatara. But even the farthest sanctuaries would soon be too near.
STRANGERS BEARING GIFTS
In 1642 a Dutch sailing fleet commanded by Abel Tasman sighted the Aotearoan homeland, “a large land, uplifted high.” Tasman’s men were likely looking upon the frosted peaks of the coastal range now called Fiordland, on the southern island of what his cartographers would later name New Zealand. A canoe loaded with islanders came out to meet Tasman and, not trusting the looks or intentions of the strangers, rammed one of his vessels and killed four of his crew. Tasman’s men returned the greeting, killing several of the islanders. Welcome to Aotearoa. Without stepping ashore, Tasman beat a hasty retreat, away from the newly christened Murderer’s Bay, and sailed north for what he hoped would be warmer receptions in Fiji.
A century later the outside world came knocking again, this time sticking around for keeps. In 1769, HMS Endeavour, commanded by James Cook, made its way from Great Britain across the Atlantic, around South America’s Cape Horn, and west into the Polynesian universe of the South Pacific. On October 6, with the help of a Tahitian guide, Cook and the crew of the Endeavour reached the land of New Zealand and began charting its shores and meeting its residents, the Māori.
To Cook, the Māori were a paradoxical people with a gift for elegant gardens and a fearsome reputation for eating their enemies. Cook traded cloth, beads, and nails for the Māori’s fish, sweet potatoes, and dog-skin cloaks. Occasionally the two traded aggressions, canoe-loads of Māori singing heartily of killing Cook and crew, Cook and crew returning the compliments with guns and cannons.
Cook would eventually make three Pacific voyages, stopping each time in New Zealand and leaving more than trinkets and the occasional skirmish behind. His boats came increasingly loaded with animals from home. “Floating menageries” of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, rabbits, chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, peafowl, dogs, cats, cockroaches, and rats toured the Pacific, as guests of Captain Cook. The barnyard passengers were regularly unloaded as gifts to the islanders. The ships’ stowaway vermin helped themselves ashore. Cook’s mooring lines provided his ships’ rats with the equivalent of gangplanks, spilling them ashore like convoys of cruise-ship tourists.
The rats of Cook’s ships were an animal apart from the Māori’s kiore. They were Rattus norvegicus, brown rats originally misnamed Norway rats, natives of northeast China that had mastered a rewarding vocation raiding the grain bins and garbage heaps of Western civilization, and stealing rides on its sailing ships around the world. “They stood in their holes peering at you like grandfathers in a doorway,” wrote a young adventurer named Herman Melville from aboard one of the whaling ships that would one day inspire Moby-Dick. “Every chink and cranny swarmed with them; they did not live among you, but you among them.”
Once ashore, ferried either aboard cargo or by the paddling of their own little feet, the brown rats immediately made themselves at home. Not quite as able climbers as the kiore, they made a better living on the ground. They combed the beaches for shellfish and sand fleas and stranded marine life. They prowled the seabird colonies that had come to such shores as New Zealand’s to avoid their type. The brown rats swept inland, pushing the smaller kiore aside, making meat of forest birds so conveniently nesting on the ground. They spread through the mountains and forests.
By the 1870s the plague of rats had become a common entry in the journals of New Zealand’s colonial naturalists. “This cosmopolitan pest swarms through every part of the country, and nothing escapes its voracity,” wrote the ornithologist Walter Buller. “It is very abundant in all our woods, and the wonder rather is that any of our insessorial birds are able to bear their broods in safety. Species that nest in hollow trees, or in other situations accessible to the ravages of this little thief, are found to be decreasing, while other species whose nests are, as a rule, more favorably placed, continue to exist in undiminished numbers.”
“These rats are the great enemies of birds, and any bird living or breeding near the ground has but a small chance of existing,” wrote the ironic Andreas Reischek, a noted collector and plunderer of New Zealand’s scarcest avifauna. “They play havoc alike with eggs and young, and even attack the parent birds … It took five months of shooting, poisoning and trapping before they showed signs of decreasing around camp.”
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, what was left of the New Zealand fauna had been invaded by a third species of rat. Rattus rattus, the black rat, had made its way from its homeland in Southeast Asia with the sailors and whalers of the southern seas. More lithe and athletic than the brown rat, and a better climber of trees than the kiore, the black rat was the most versatile killer of the trio.
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.
THE LEGEND OF TIBBLES
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 Māori 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
IN 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 Māori 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.
THE HANDYMAN
Richard Henry was adrift and penniless on the far end of the country, in Auckland, when the telegram re
ached 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.
Rat Island Page 3