Rat Island

by William Stolzenburg

  The following November, with the dawning of the New Zealand summer, Merton’s team returned for their second major mission to bring the last Fiordland kakapos to safety. They were welcomed in genuine Fiordland fashion, sequentially flogged by storms and swarmed by sand flies. They became more intimately acquainted with the insides of their tents, and the writings of Richard Henry. They played their tapes, heard no replies. And finally, in a high valley of Mount Tutoko, they came to a freshly hollowed-out depression that they hoped was a kakapo bowl. That night they were regaled for nearly six hours by the booming, from not more than twenty paces away, of a kakapo.

  After a Christmas break, Merton returned packing a new piece of wartime technology, a night-vision scope designed for detecting enemies in the dark. He sat through the long dark hours, waiting with his scope, reliving Richard Henry’s dream, “to come here in the season with the eyes of a cat.” And on the third night, at ten forty-seven P.M., with good light and a cooperating kakapo, Merton watched in perfect clarity the phenomenon that had perhaps never been witnessed by human eyes.

  What Merton would dryly record in his field book—“Began sequence in upright position, then lowered body with grunts to horizontal”—was in life a spellbinding performance, beginning with a swelling from the kakapo’s breast, its head all but disappearing into a balloon of bird. Then followed a bodily quaking and the celebrated song called booming, the sound of a bird sending forth a tireless series of gut-rumbling grunts—its bowl serving as resonating chamber—as one blowing into a bottle.

  Merton was watching a kakapo in love song, thumping its tympanic invitations over the yawning chasms and head walls of Fiordland. It was the pulse of the New Zealand outback, and it was still beating, if barely.

  With the spell of secrecy broken, the fortunes of the search team suddenly flowered. In Sinbad Gully, Merton and crew heard two more kakapos booming from the ridge above camp, one of which now turned the tables on its pursuers. Wildlife technician Rod Morris was out at midday, retracing his steps from a kakapo bowl, when up the trail came walking a kakapo. Morris stood in shock. The bird kept coming. It strutted to within a couple strides of Morris, stopped and spread its wings, and clacked its bill. It climbed a tree, inspected Morris once over, then climbed down to its bowl and began to boom.

  Over the following days, the kakapo observers became the observed. The curious kakapo would walk into their blind to inspect things, to be treated with handouts of cabbage and rudimentary attempts at conversation. It would turn out the lonely parrot was interested in more than small talk. He would perform his dance for the men, swaying from side to side, languorously waving his wings like a butterfly.

  He grew bolder, climbing pant legs, perching on shoulders, sometimes capping his ascent with an attempted cranial copulation. The amorous kakapo of Sinbad Gully was baldly hinting that these booming birds the men had been chasing through the hills were the lotharios of kakapo society. And that anything coming close to their bowls was to be considered fair game for either fighting or romancing. And that Richard Henry, once again, had been right after all. Henry in his years of observation and contemplation had astutely interpreted—as Merton, with his high-tech equipment, was now confirming—the kakapo’s mysterious midnight antics as that of competitive romance.

  The kakapo had evolved a communal mating system that science had come to call a lek. It was a courting strategy more typically ascribed to such birds as the prairie chicken and the bird of paradise. The lek had never even remotely been suspected of a parrot, except, of course, by the one man so many had ignored. The ballrooms that Henry had so fantastically surmised to such rude reception were now the stuff of fact. This oddest of birds—this flightless, owlish night parrot—was proving stranger with every glimpse of its secret life. And the oddball Richard Henry was to Merton’s mind proving himself an ornithological savant.

  But the answer regarding the booming bowls now raised another, more disquieting question. Given these randy male kakapos, mounting men’s heads and wadded-up sweaters with madcap passion, where were the women? The searchers had yet to find—with the dubious exception of Jill—a female kakapo. It was possible that these odd parrots, from a line of birds known for living fifty years or more, were booming for ghosts. It was possible that these were the last desperate love songs of the living dead.

  In February the men returned to the Esperance Valley, where the kakapos Jonathon and Jill had been trapped. They played their tapes and set their traps. And no bird sang.

  Their hopes waning with summer’s end, they flew on to the razor-edged ridges of Gulliver Valley, making camp high on a precarious ledge. There they finally found their hint of hope, in the freshly dug trails and booming bowls of a courting kakapo. A tracking dog named Mandy immediately caught scent and bounded toward the brink of the escarpment, her trainer, John Cheyne, and Merton scrambling behind. The bell went quiet. Cheyne and Merton came running to find dog and bird at a standoff, the kakapo backed to the edge of the dizzying precipice. Merton lunged and grabbed, gathering tight to his chest what would one day become the most celebrated kakapo of the species.

  The bird was not the female so desperately sought, but nonetheless a big, healthy male of a species now numbering a handful. Merton immediately took a special liking to this kakapo, an endearing creature that would lightly grip his fingers as he stroked his head. And soon Richard Henry Kakapo was bound for Maud Island, as one of the last hopes for a species.

  Richard Henry would be safe on his island refuge of Maud, at least so long as the stoats and rats were kept at bay. Or so long as his health held out. Nobody knew for sure how old Richard Henry was, but guesses were that he’d been holing up in the hills of Fiordland for half a century or longer. His existence conjured the most tragic of scenarios. Had Richard Henry been singing all these years to an empty theater?

  The following summer started poorly for what remained of the kakapos. There were neither sightings nor singing to be heard from the hills of Fiordland. Perhaps the fruits of the rimu trees had failed; perhaps the males had taken the year off to await better days for booming.

  The three refugees on Maud Island were faring no better. Jill’s condition was deteriorating; Jonathon could not be found. Only Richard Henry appeared to be holding his own, playing games with his captors, appearing hail and fat and all but whistling past the graveyard.

  In August the kakapo’s sliding hopes on Maud took a lurch for the cliff. In a moment of carelessness a kakapo trainee let his dog off its leash, to see it return gripping a freshly killed kakapo in its mouth. A leg band identified the bird as Jill. A necropsy would later confirm the team’s suspicions, that Jill should have been named Jack. But the graver matter now became the question of numbers. The last of the Fiordland line of kakapos now amounted to a single bird in hand. Richard Henry Kakapo, so symbolically named, was now alone.

  RESURRECTION

  Merton, the man in charge of saving the kakapo, was in need of a miracle. From the ominous silence of Fiordland, he looked to one last possible refuge. Stewart Island lay nineteen miles off the southernmost shore of New Zealand’s South Island. At 674 square miles, Stewart was New Zealand’s forgotten mainland. Populated by all of four hundred people clustered in one little settlement, it was also New Zealand’s forgotten wilderness. And to some, understandably so. Tangled with brush, flogged by foul weather, bereft of Fiordland’s great snowcapped peaks and postcard prominence, it was certainly not the most glamorous place to look for New Zealand’s most enigmatic bird. But Stewart Island did have a history of kakapos, sketchy though it was.

  There had been sightings in 1949 and 1951, and one as recently as 1970, the latter of the most bizarre kind. A hunter, sitting in a tree waiting for deer, had looked down to the commotion of a screaming beast running beneath him, a beast he described as a “large dullish-green native parrot.” Fast on its tail was a rat. The hunter shot the rat, picked up the parrot, propped it on a branch, and took a picture. He reported the bird to
an official with the New Zealand Forest Service, who apparently filed the report and forgot about it.

  With such crumbs for clues, and nowhere else left to look, Merton sent his men searching. In January of 1977, half of his team descended on the island’s southern shore. Within hours of striking off into the bush, the men found unmistakable signs of kakapos.

  Here were the manicured footpaths of a flightless bird, radiating from a network of earthen bowls. Two nights later the searchers heard those bowls resonating the bass rhythms of kakapos in song. These were not the hints of one last kakapo biding its time until the great good-bye. This was a thriving population. On just one hill spread a maze of trails and bowls tended by no less than eighteen vigorously courting kakapos.

  Over the next three years, Stewart Island would host both the brightest and the darkest moments of kakapo conservation history. The brightest came in March 1980, when the kakapo-tracking dog Jasper veered onto a scent. Jasper coursed this way and that, then headed out, the clanging from his collar followed by the striking figure of a tall, gaunt man, bearded to the waist. Gary “Arab” Aburn, a seasoned dog handler and itinerant kakapo technician, chased Jasper out of sight, to where the clanging finally stilled. He returned to camp minutes later, producing from his capture bag a kakapo like none the team had ever seen. It was a slighter bird with finer features, greener plumage, and a sassier attitude. Arab uttered the hope on everybody’s mind: “I think we’ve got a female.”

  But how to know for sure? None among them had ever seen a living female kakapo. Merton, though, had certainly seen enough of them dead. Between his stints in the bush he had been searching the libraries and museums. He had read every description of female kakapos that Richard Henry had written. He had talked with ornithologists and parrot breeders and had examined kakapo specimens from museums around the world. Poring over all the specimens, Merton had narrowed his focus to one consistent field mark, a subtle distinction in plumage between the sexes. The tips of the male’s outermost wing feathers were faintly mottled. Those on the females were not.

  Merton, now with mystery bird in hand and television cameras rolling, began fingering through the wing feathers for markings, wishing for all his worth to find none. No markings appeared on the first feather, nor on the second. Down the line he went, one feather to the next, the feathers coming up blank, every feather to the last. “None on that one, none on that one, none on that one, none on that one. Right? Female!” Merton, in a moment he would liken to “touching eternity,” cradled to breast the first female kakapo in modern history.

  Before the end of the season, the team had found not only eleven kakapos but also the first two kakapo nests. The kakapo’s imminent extinction was put on hold. Finally there were females in hand, with more birds in the bush—perhaps as many as two hundred on Stewart Island—and at least a chance that the most enigmatic and endangered parrot had not yet slipped into the vortex. But the kakapo, it would turn out, was not a bird to foster prolonged celebrations.

  Amid the exaltations of the kakapo’s eleventh-hour reprieve would come a small but sobering reminder of the times. Just before the first Stewart Island expedition had decamped in 1977, the team had discovered the droppings of a cat. The presence of cats on the island came as no surprise. They’d had the run of the place since the 1800s (compliments of visiting seal hunters), and their feral population had since flourished with occasional reinforcements from the town of Oban. But this one, so close to the kakapos’ courtyard, raised fears to another level, fears that were soon to be confirmed.

  By mid-1980 the crews on their rounds had picked up two hundred more cat droppings. Six of them contained pieces of kakapo. The next season came with cat-eaten carcasses of kakapos, many of them wearing leg bands or transmitters fitted by the researchers themselves. There was no telling how many more piles of feather and bone lay undiscovered in the Stewart Island scrub. Less than four years since rising from the grave, the kakapo was now threatening to reverse the miracle.

  Merton requested permission to start poisoning the cats, to transfer more females to Maud Island—anything to salvage the unfolding disaster. The months went by, politics trumped endangered species, and permission was denied. For Merton it was shades of Big South Cape, again watching the fire from behind the police tape. When at last the authorities relented in May 1981, Merton and his team scrambled to secure the only two kakapo nests known. Around the nests they laid five hundred pieces of fish injected with Compound 1080. They sat in blinds, in round-the-clock surveillance, guarding kakapo chicks through the nights. Through those long vigils crept an air of futility. Either there would forever be a ranger affixed to every kakapo nest, or there would inevitably come an unguarded moment when an opportunistic cat would undo a lifetime of work. Merton saw himself bailing the ocean with a bucket. To his mind, the only option left for saving the Stewart Island kakapos was the same he had faced five years earlier when he had flown Richard Henry out of his Fiordland home.

  The decision to evacuate or to stay would reopen the philosophical rift. Those of the hands-off persuasion—indignant at resigning a million-year work of creation to the ham-handed care of humankind—argued for leaving the kakapo at home, to ride out the storm as nature ordained. Merton and those more willing to play God would cradle the kakapo out of harm’s way, for however long it should take.

  Merton’s God squad was granted a token compromise. The team would be allowed to transfer twenty-five birds from Stewart Island, to another recently cleared of cats, an island off the coast of Auckland named Little Barrier. Once again, though, Merton’s fears were vindicated with horrific quickness. Before the kakapo catchers could gather their quota, the hands-off policy left the only two nests unguarded long enough for the world’s only three kakapo chicks to disappear.

  It would not be the last blow to the kakapo’s foundering ship. In 1984, with Richard Henry the sole remaining Fiordland kakapo under protection, Merton and his Wildlife Service comrades legally challenged the board of administrators of Fiordland National Park for drastic action. The last few male kakapos that remained in those stoat-haunted mountains, bearing the last of the Fiordland genes, should be captured and sequestered on one of the predator-free islands, if there was to be any chance of saving them. The park administrators, frozen with caution, stubborn with territoriality, ordered the birds left where they were. It was a decision that would dearly cost the kakapo. In the following years the searchers returned to the once-booming chasms to find silence. By 1987 only four males were known to survive over the immensity of Fiordland. Two years later, when Merton and crew returned for one last search, the only signs were a few overgrown booming bowls and the withered husks of leaves chewed long ago. Those who had demanded that the kakapo live out its days in Fiordland had been granted their wish with tragic swiftness.

  In a matter of a few short years, the fortunes of the kakapo had gone from dismal to hopeful to desperate. To save the remaining Stewart Island kakapos, now surrounded by a closing ring of predators, a crew of cat killers were sent in with poisons and the duty to defend. They too were defeated. The rest of the Stewart Island clan were eventually either evacuated by the rescuers or eaten by the cats. By 1992 what remained of the species was gathered in makeshift island refuges, all hopes hanging on human-administered life support.

  Chapter 6

  BATTLE FOR BREAKSEA

  THE KAKAPO HAD become a fugitive from its own country. It could not be expected to survive for long with so few birds in so few places, regardless of the number of nursemaids tending them day and night. What the bird needed, beyond the intensive care, was a place to live—a safe and fertile place, free of strange predators, big enough to house kakapo in large, wholesome numbers—someplace far bigger than the stopgap sanctuaries of Maud or Little Barrier. As for the kakapo, so it was for so many of New Zealand’s endangered oddities. In many cases the habitat was still there, waiting. But the places still free of predators were not. It seemed clear, at least to a sm
all but passionate lot, where the work of conservation needed doing. And fortunately for the kakapo, there was a movement finally rising to the task.

  It had begun in November 1976, with a conference convened in the city of Wellington. Over two days some fifty-seven leading wildlife authorities met over the arcane title theme “The Ecology and Control of Rodents in New Zealand Nature Reserves.” Ostensibly a discussion on rats, the gathering would serve as a referendum on the state of saving island life from a world of invaders.

  The meeting was called to order by Gordon Williams, who as it happened had twenty years before led the first modern expedition to find the last kakapos of Fiordland. Williams assumed the tongue-in-cheek personage of the white-wigged judge, with figurative gavel in hand and murderers on trial. “Arraigned before this very distinguished tribunal today are four species of rodents who are known generally to be rogues and vagabonds and also on occasion to have committed murder,” he intoned. “We will hear about their crimes today. To what extent they are guilty of genocide it will be for you to decide at the end.”

  Williams had rightly anticipated a jury divided over one of nature’s most divisive creations. Pesky pest or deadly force? Fightable foe or indomitable enemy? Between those seeking the answers—a collection of graybeard academics and revered authorities, hill-charging recruits and tenderfoot soldiers—lay a philosophical divide.