Rat Island by William Stolzenburg Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€œHe 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.
    â€œThe 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,