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 kakapoâs predicament. The first half of the season turned up no sign. From one valley to the next, the team found disappointment. Herds of red deerâsportsmenâs imports from Europeâhad eaten the kakapoâs food. Australian possums and British stoats had eaten the kakapos outright. An unspoken fear began wearing on the crewâs 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 worldâs 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 captorsâ 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 Bruceâfour of the only five kapapos known on Earthâwere 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
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 kakapoâs predicament. The first half of the season turned up no sign. From one valley to the next, the team found disappointment. Herds of red deerâsportsmenâs imports from Europeâhad eaten the kakapoâs food. Australian possums and British stoats had eaten the kakapos outright. An unspoken fear began wearing on the crewâs 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 worldâs 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 captorsâ 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 Bruceâfour of the only five kapapos known on Earthâwere 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
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