Rat Island by William Stolzenburg Read Free Book Online Page A

woodhens, blue ducks, and such like—they followed up the more palatable game,” wrote the surveyor George Mueller. “They will continue to thrive until the extermination of our ground birds, now begun, is fully accomplished.”
    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