Rat Island by William Stolzenburg Page A

other naturalist of the field or pretender from academia had ever known it. Beyond the more commonly held facts of this singular bird—this solitary, nocturnal, owl-headed parrot that waddled like an elf through dwarf forests of scrub—the kakapo was still queerer by far than any could have imagined. In January 1898, while high on a mountain spine, Henry came upon a network of paths beaten firmly into the spongy earth. They ran for half a mile, interrupted at intervals by round depressions, as if the ground had been stamped by an elephant’s foot. Henry measured the depressions at eighteen inches across. He had once imagined these as kakapo dust baths, a hypothesis that now struck him as absurd. No particle of dust stood a chance on a hill that received, by the sodden Henry’s estimation, an inch of rain a day.
    â€œSo ‘dusting-hole’ is, I think, therefore, a bad name,” Henry wrote. “ ‘Bower’ would be more suitable.” To Henry these were the ballrooms of the kakapo in courting. It was from these ballrooms that the booming voice of the kakapo had serenaded him as he lay alone on those late nights at Lake Te Anau. He could now envision the underlying spectacle behind the mysterious crooning in the darkness. “I think that the males take up their places in these ‘bowers,’ distend their air-sacks, and start their enchanting love-songs; and that the females, like others of the sex, love the music and parade, and come up to see the show—that is, if they can see the green and yellow in the dark; if not they can tramp along the pathways, listen to the music, and have a gossip with the best performers.”
    Henry raised questions that hardly occurred to the curators of museum skins but would one day bear heavily on the kakapo’s precarious future. Why, he asked, did the kakapo not boom and breed every year? “Can it be that they have curious social laws as mysterious as those of ants or bees—that they have a captain or queen to foresee a season of scarcity or abundance and order their conduct accordingly?”
    The kakapo’s sporadic breeding schedule, combined with a habit of laying but one or two eggs on average, suggested a species betting heavily on every chick. Which in turn helped explain their plummetting numbers in a countryside newly swarming with predators.
    Henry began to realize the depths of the kakapo’s vulnerability. Never mind that here was a big, meaty, flightless bird with a fetching scent and eons of ingrained innocence. Compared to its eggs and chicks, the adult kakapo was a veritable fortress. The mother kakapo, Henry discovered, as a habit received no help at the nest. At night, off she would wander, leaving behind eggs or helpless chicks. The father kakapo, Henry noted, “won’t even keep off the rats while the mother is tramping away for food for her little ones.”
    Two months would pass before the kakapo chick, so plump and defenseless, was ready to leave the nest. Two months, in a land increasingly prowled by predators, was a harrowing length of time to dodge the inevitable danger.
    T HE W EASEL
    Reports from the mainland warned Henry that those dangers were fast heading his way. In 1897, a surveying party exploring an overland route to Dusky Sound came back with news that the invasion of the Fiordland coast had begun. “I do not know to what to attribute the scarcity of small birds,” reported the expedition’s leader, E. H. Wilmot, though he hazarded a guess. “Ferrets or weasels are evidently scattered about, and one of my men says that a ferret paid him a visit in his tent one night.”
    By then Richard Henry had already begun to suspect that something was amiss in his coastal paradise as well. “I think the ferrets have been down to Supper Cove. In 14 days I saw only one M ā ori hen and two kakapos … We were no distance from the hills and heard no birds at