Rat Island

by William Stolzenburg

TRIAGE

  By now it was obvious to Merton what the irrupting rats meant for Big South Cape Island. He and his boss, Brian Bell, had sampled widely across the New Zealand archipelago, camping to the late-night din of birds where the predators hadn’t yet reached, and lying in silence where they had. Most fittingly, both had visited Big South Cape in 1961, preinvasion, to find the most prolific and pristine of bird sanctuaries. Both knew what now lay in store with the island under attack. Yet neither man could quite fathom what they were hearing from headquarters.

  Back in Wellington the decision makers were demurring, suggesting a wait-and-see approach to the unfolding riot on Big South Cape. Bell’s requests for action were denied. Days and weeks went by. Bell and Merton sat captive to the tunes of bureaucratic fiddling, all the while smelling the smoke of their precious sanctuary going up in flames. Five months passed before the authorities relented. Bell and Merton gathered a small team and hurried for Big South Cape, to finally step ashore, as feared, to the aftermath of a biological bomb strike.

  They peered into the ransacked houses of the muttonbirders, their mattresses shredded for rat nests. Wallpaper—hung with a backing of flour paste—had been stripped as high as a hungry rat could jump. The wreckage outside was worse. North of the harbor, the epicenter of the irruption, the birds were gone. No more saddlebacks, wrens, fernbirds, robins, or snipes. The ubiquitous bellbirds and parakeets, once so raucous, had been nearly silenced. The trees of the birds’ forests had been stripped of bark, bushes had been chewed to the ground. Even the insects, including the flagship giant wetas, had all but vanished.

  Bell and Merton quickly sorted through the wounded. The short-tailed bat was given up for dead. All attentions came to center on the three rarest resident birds. For the Stead’s bush wren, the Stewart Island snipe, and the South Island saddleback, their last refuge had become their death trap. Their only hope, by Bell and Merton’s diagnosis, was to be whisked to a new sanctuary.

  The crew started netting what was left of the birds. They herded and grabbed the clueless little wrens and saddlebacks as they hopped about at their feet. They formed lines of human drivers to flush the snipes, netting as they went.

  As birds came under their care, the team began scouring the surroundings for rations. They spent nearly every waking hour digging for worms, turning rocks for grasshoppers, and trapping moths by lantern light.

  The saddlebacks thrived on the medics’ makeshift hash. But the wrens’ and the snipes’ needs would go unmet. The helping hands were hard-pressed to gather the delicate prey preferred by the tiny wrens, to meet the bottomless appetite of the snipes. Their utmost efforts fell short. The last two Stewart Island snipes died in their rescuers’ hands. And the fading wrens were down to a harrowing half dozen.

  With the world’s last six bush wrens in hand, Bell and Merton made a run for refuge. A navy launch ferried them to the shores of a nearby island. Kaimohu was free of predators and people, with good reason. Its gentlest landing was a gauntlet of twelve-foot swells crashing upon jagged rock. It was the wrens’ only hope, if also the rescuers undoing.

  As the boat neared the rock, Bell stood poised on the bow ready to leap, with Merton halfway back, relaying instructions to the wheelhouse.

  “How close, Don?” yelled the captain.

  “Twenty feet,” Merton shouted.

  “How close, Don?”

  “Ten feet.”

  The boat made a go, the waves rose up in menace. It made another go, and another, like a thread searching the eye of a moving needle. On the final run, as the bow clipped the edge of the rock, Bell hopped off.

  A deckhand threw Bell a taut line, then fastened tight the cage of wrens. Hand over hand, Bell hauled the last six hopes for the Stead’s bush wren across the chasm and into his arms. Stepping delicately, he carried them to the edge of the scrub and opened the cage. There was nothing more that anybody could do for them now.

  It was now Bell’s turn to be rescued. He scrambled to the edge of the rock, tied a rope around himself, and into the raging winter water of the Southern Ocean he jumped. The cold shock knocked him breathless. The crew hauling fast on the rope nearly drowned him en route. By the time he was pulled aboard, Bell was red as a lobster and shivering uncontrollably.

  Bell would ultimately recover; the wrens he’d tried to rescue would not. Over the next few years crews would return to check up on the little refugees, with dispiriting results. Merton saw his last bush wren in 1967. A single bird was sighted again in 1972, for the final time.

  And that was that. In a flash of history, even as the birds’ would-be rescuers had looked on, New Zealand and the world had lost three species to eternity, hanging on to a fourth only by a hairbreadth and a Herculean effort. The catastrophe at Big South Cape had vindicated Bell and Merton, the messengers of doom. It had served the ivory tower skeptics a sobering lesson in island ecology, a world where rats would be kings.

  For Merton the die had been cast—if not with the dead albatross of Taiaroa Head, if not with the petrel slaughter on Maria Island, then certainly with the storming of Big South Cape’s matchless sanctuary. New Zealand’s embattled fauna was not to be saved by sifting through the smoldering ruins and praying for survivors. Its rescue demanded intervention against the invaders, head-on and with violence as needed. Somewhere out there more Big South Cape massacres were brewing. Somewhere out there the last of the natives were still clinging to the shreds of their homeland, with alien predators closing fast. And most conspicuous among the missing was the bird that Richard Henry had left for dead.

  Chapter 5

  THE NIGHT PARROT

  IN THE YEARS following Henry’s heroic defeat, the kakapo had slipped into the murky netherworld of hearsay and phantom noises in the night. The latest wave of killer stoats and cats had chased the last of the kakapos to the highest, coldest, most rugged, and least inviting corners of New Zealand. Hunters and road crews pushing into Fiordland’s final frontier would occasionally come back mentioning that they’d heard that haunting heartbeat from the hillsides. It wasn’t until 1949 that a team from the New Zealand Wildlife Service, in a Fiordland expedition searching for exotic elk, returned with a report of having actually seen, among other things, two kakapos.

  The kakapo by any measure was no longer even remotely that ubiquitous voice of the New Zealand outback, whose drummings and screamings had rudely awakened the explorers in their camps, whose tragically grounded trust had once fed their expeditions with easy meat. Over the next decade, having finally come to realize that nobody on Earth could now reliably locate a single living kakapo, the Wildlife Service mounted a succession of searches. Deep into the mountains and valleys of Fiordland they trekked, scouring those places having recently harbored the birds. During the first nine years of kakapo search, the service found none.

  It wasn’t until March of 1958, in a high rocky meadow beneath the peak of Mount Tutoko, that a search team of five men and two dogs honed in on the first fresh signs, feathers and chewed leaves and seed-studded droppings. A dog on the trail of what all hoped was the telltale scent of the night parrot came to a pointing halt. The bell stopped ringing. Men came running. And there, in the hollow of a large rock, clueless to the world, lay a sleeping kakapo.

  Soon in hand, and understandably grumpy over its rude awakening, this somewhat bedraggled, one-eyed parrot nonetheless embodied history. A live kakapo in hand was an event that had taken half a century beyond Richard Henry to be repeated. The team took photos and released the bird, believing with unfounded optimism that they would soon find more.

  Next summer the team returned to Fiordland, its ranks this time including a young trainee named Don Merton. Merton would witness with the others the full gravity of the kakapo’s predicament. The first half of the season turned up no sign. From one valley to the next, the team found disappointment. Herds of red deer—sportsmen’s imports from Europe—had eaten the kakapo’s food. Australian possums and British stoats had eaten the kakapos outr
ight. An unspoken fear began wearing on the crew’s resolve. Perhaps they had already seen the last of the kakapo.

  Finally, in the wildest remnant of the Fiordland outback, high in a walled-in Shangri-La named Sinbad Gully, the team found hope. They had come upon a network of seemingly fresh foot-worn trails running through the bush. The trails veered this way and that, invariably ending in saucer-shaped depressions, what ornithologists had come to imagine as the dust bowls of the kakapo. Never mind that Richard Henry had long ago and sagely observed that dust was a rarer commodity than kakapos in these rain-soaked hills. Whatever their purpose, the tracks and bowls could only be the work of a singular lineage of bird. The kakapo could once again be imagined.

  The following summer another party returned to Sinbad Gully, with cages and baits and resuscitated hopes. They camped high in a mountain cleft bearing encouraging signs and set their traps. On the morning of January 25, they found two of the cages occupied. One contained a possum. The other held a kakapo.

  There was no letting this kakapo go. Cradled like a long-lost infant rescued from the wilderness, the precious bird was hurried off the mountain and into a waiting car and driven cross-country. Little more than twelve hours after capture, the world’s only known kakapo was ensconced at a farm named Mount Bruce, in what was to become the National Wildlife Center. Fiordland, once a seemingly invulnerable fortress, in the modern era of mainland predators was no longer fit for harboring wild kakapo.

  But neither, it turned out, were the makeshift confinements of Mount Bruce. By mid-February, four more birds had been caught and transferred to the aviary, to their ultimate demise. They had suffered their long overland trip. And they would suffer thereafter their captors’ ignorance and neglect. The kakapo, solitary by nature, fretted and fought when caged in close quarters. Aviaries went untended, droppings piled high, and sleeping quarters crawled with maggots. Disease soon followed the filth. Before the next Fiordland expedition was through, four of the five captive kakapos at Mount Bruce—four of the only five kapapos known on Earth—were dead.

  By 1973, with further searches failing, it had become obvious to a particular few that a single male kakapo decaying in a cage was not the stuff of frontline conservation but a front-row seat to extinction. Don Merton and Brian Bell, looking on from the sidelines, lobbied their superiors for an infusion of fresh blood, namely themselves. That year, with the bulldog Bell eventually extracting the administrative concession, his quiet protégé Merton took over as leader of the kakapo field project.

  Both men by then had seen, up close, in the catastrophe at Big South Cape, the results of the wait-and-see approach in an island ecosystem under such assault. They had also seen, in their intensive-care rescue of the South Island saddleback, that patients in such dire straits could be brought back from the dead. It would require massive doses of resolve and something else all but missing from the New Zealand countryside. It would require the same missing element whose lack seventy years before had ultimately doomed Richard Henry’s rescue of the kakapos: a safe and wild place to keep them.

  Merton scanned the country map, looking for sanctuary among the islands. The New Zealand archipelago numbered more than seven hundred offshore islands of varying size, but so few of them remained free of kakapo enemies. Down the line, Merton scratched candidates from the list: too little forest, too many people, too many carnivorous animals from foreign countries. On this island roamed feral cats and rats. On that one lurked stoats and possums.

  Merton’s finger finally came to rest in Cook Strait, between New Zealand’s main islands. In the archipelago of Marlborough Sounds there remained a relatively large unsettled island, one of the few still free of the entire suite of foreign predators. Maud Island, decided Merton, was the temporary sanctuary where the kakapo might begin its long walk back.

  If only he could now find one. Merton and his crew made new plans for a Fiordland expedition, ramped up with fresh troops and a new means of transport. To deal with Fiordland’s overwhelming immensities, the kakapo rescuers enlisted the helicopter. The days of lugging and tramping over snowy peak and jungled dale were to be replaced by a few queasy minutes of vertiginous flight over the jagged roof of New Zealand.

  SEARCH AND RESCUE

  In February 1974, the first helicopter-powered expedition in search of the kakapo set out for Fiordland. It was billed as the last chance to save the species; it was financed more as an administrative afterthought. Merton was given money to search only one location.

  Merton chose the Esperance Valley. The Esperence was especially rugged and remote, and it came with a sign, in the form of a single kakapo dropping discovered the year before. Soon after setting up camp, the new expedition found fresh feathers. They left out an apple and came back the next morning to find it chewed by the beak of a bird. They rushed to build a holding pen.

  The next night Merton staked out the site of the eaten apple. He sat in the cold, waiting, shivering, until his veins suddenly warmed in a bath of adrenaline. From somewhere close at hand had come a rustling. It came from one side, then the next. Whatever was out there was circling him.

  From out of the dark came a scream. It was a grating sound that the birdman Merton could only ascribe to one species. He slipped away and returned with a tape recorder. That evening he captured the voice of the kakapo.

  Over the next few nights Merton and the team sat out with his recordings, calling for kakapo. The kakapo responded, and now with an apparently keen sense of mischief. The bird would circle the men in the dark, at times, it seemed, within arm’s length. It climbed nearby trees and taunted the men with glimpses of its silhouette. Its curiosity grew. One of the men awoke from his post to the sounds of footsteps scuffling past his head. It became debatable as to who was tracking whom. Every morning the light of day would reveal the trap lying empty.

  While the resident kakapo doled out its nightly tauntings, the ill-tempered gods of Fiordland soon came to administer their own. Gale winds and heavy rains and summer squalls of snow pinned the team in their tents, blotting out days of fieldwork.

  Merton had come prepared. Even while the Fiordland trolls pummeled his nylon shelter, he continued his kakapo studies from his sleeping bag. He pulled out stacks of library papers he’d packed, acquainting himself with almost everything written on this oddest of birds. Which, as would soon become apparent, meant acquainting himself with that oddest of men who had written most of it. Richard Henry, in his years afield, chasing, catching, and caring for hundreds of kakapos, had provided science with its best portraits of the creature nobody else had bothered to know.

  Not that science had much listened. Merton, as a student of wildlife, had learned of Henry as the academics had portrayed him, as an uneducated country bushman playing with rare birds. Now, as commander of the kakapo expedition, lying captive in his tent, Merton was painting his own picture of Henry as something other than the village oddball.

  Henry had earned his degrees honestly, in the field. While his contemporaries had taken the far simpler tack of killing the kakapo for profit, he had pioneered the more painstaking art of watching and catching them and keeping them alive. He had first perfected the search, behind the nose of a muzzled dog with sounding bell. He had fed and cared for and safely carried to new quarters hundreds of birds. Henry’s translocation protocol—the dog, the cages, and special kakapo diets—would become standard practice for Merton and the new generation of bodyguards picking up where Henry had left off. Ever the meticulous observer, Henry had a rare eye for details large and small. He had rightly warned of the government’s release of the meat-eating mustelid clan, as the doom of New Zealand’s flightless fauna. He had astutely connected the periodic irruptions of invading rats to the subsequent silence of native birds.

  Henry, in his life’s defining work, had miscalculated by only one vital detail. He had put all his lovingly gathered eggs in the wrong basket. He had put his faith in Resolution, an island very nearly—but disastrously not quite—o
ut of swimming range of the weasel.

  Merton would not repeat that mistake, if ever he got the chance. Henry had captured nearly four hundred kakapos; Merton was still working on his first. The camp’s impish kakapo was still at large, and looking to stay that way. For more than a week the bird artfully dodged all pursuers, before finally slipping up. On the morning of March 6, in the cage that had consistently come up empty, the crew now came upon the disgruntled figure of a live kakapo.

  It was a disheveled specimen, soaked from the night’s rain, a single bedraggled entity representing the future of its kind. Celebrations notwithstanding, it was hard to fend off the sobering doubts over the improbable savior standing before them. Even the irrepressible Merton could muster no more than a thinly disguised elegy. “We may be looking at the last of the species.”

  Jonathon, as he was christened, at first did little to allay their fears. For a week he refused all offerings of food; his weight began to drop. Merton took to cradling the weakening bird in his arm, hand-feeding him a hodgepodge of camp food until he began to find his appetite. Merton offered Jonathon honey water fortified with vitamins and minerals. He started mixing in the bird’s native seeds and berries and foliage. Merton recorded every morsel that went into Jonathon’s increasingly busy beak. The menu soon exceeded sixty items.

  With Jonathon tenuously thriving, the team went back to the bush for what they hoped would be his mate. It would eventually become clear how remarkably little, in the twentieth century, anybody yet knew about the kakapo, an ignorance succinctly evoked by the daily inspections of empty nets. Among their more humbling blunders, the kakapo chasers had been stringing their nets above the river bottoms running through the valley, in hopes of snagging any kakapos gliding across by night—waiting hopelessly as they would later come to realize for a flightless bird to fly.

  That season the team managed to capture (with the help of a tracking dog) one more kakapo, a smallish bird they wishfully named Jill. On April 1 they helicoptered Jill and Jonathon out of Fiordland and over the mountains to the holding pens of Maud Island, to try again what Richard Henry had so heartbreakingly failed to do some sixty years before on Resolution Island. They were to populate Maud Island with as many pairs of kakapos as they could find, then help the kakapos take it from there. They had huge advantages over Henry, of manpower and the wings to fly anywhere the kakapo might still be hiding. They had the disadvantage of not knowing for sure whether there were any more hiding kakapos to be found.