For a moment before it fell down, the helicopter hovered above the water like a dragonfly, straining against gravity, and the three men inside it braced for the in­evitable. Their reaction was well rehearsed: one arm shielding the head, the other hand finding and gripping the doorknob of an emergency exit. The impact was soft as the cabin splashed into the water and briefly bobbed like a buoy. Then, top-heavy with the weight of the engine, the machine flipped upside-down and began to sink, a bubble of safety turn­ing into a death trap for its occupants. Through every crevice the water surged in, swirling into froth until the inside of the cabin felt like a washing machine, with a pocket of air rapidly shrinking against the floor that was now the ceiling.

The three men, still strapped to their seats and disoriented by the capsize, were tense with anticipation, but they knew they must wait: outside the cabin the helicop­ter’s rotor might still be scything the water like the blades of a blender. There is a procedure to this chaos, and the men re­mained calm. They took a final gasp of disappearing air, just as the swirling whitewater blurred their vision. “One … two … three,” they paced their breathless wait, “… four … FIVE! Push the door open. Unbuckle the seat belt. Go!”

They wormed their way out and bolted towards the light and air, now several metres above them. Two of the men burst through the surface and sucked in rapid lungfuls of air, but the third one breathed normally, displaying remarkable calm. “That was good, gentlemen,” he said, floating alongside them, “but we’ll do it again, just so that you really get it nailed.”

A crane was already lifting the mocked-up helicopter out of the pool, readying it for another simulated crash, and at poolside more people in white overalls nervously awaited their turn. This was not an exercise for elite military forces or the coastguard, nor an emer­gency drill for workers on the nearby Taranaki offshore oil rigs, even if the venue and instructors suggested other­wise. Yet the 14 men and women undertaking this un­derwater escape training in New Plymouth were special forces of a sort. By the time they had completed their two weeks of aquanautics, they would also have learned how to skipper an inflatable craft through surf that would fling their boat two or three metres into the air, and how to fish each other out of the breakers should someone fall overboard. They would have passed a run–swim–run Ironman-like test to become qualified lifesavers.

And lifesavers is exactly what they are. The irony is that their SAS-style training is preparing them to save and protect one of the world’s gentlest and most peaceful creatures, the kākāpō—flightless, noctur­nal, solitary, and hopelessly adorable.

The kākāpō must be the cuddliest of all living things. Soft, fluffy and intelligent, this Persian cat of a parrot has plumage the colour of fresh moss and a scent of papaya. It has no fear of humans. A wild kākāpō will clamber up your leg and arm and sit on your shoulder, nibbling gently at your cheek and ears or preening your hair. It can be playful like a kitten or ap­pear owlishly wise, its beady chocolate-coloured eyes holding your gaze, then drifting out of focus, looking through you like the stare of a Buddhist monk.

The bird has already stolen many hearts. Don Merton, standing wet at the edge of the training pool, can’t bear the thought that if this helicopter crash hap­pened in real life, he’d most likely have with him several cat boxes containing kākāpō, which he would probably have to leave behind.

For the past 40 years, Merton has been an ambulance man for endangered birds. He is best known for the rescue of the Chatham Islands black robin, whose num­bers once slumped to five, just one of which was a productive female, but he was also instrumental in snatching the last re­maining South Island saddlebacks from rat-infested Big South Cape Island, off the coast of Rakiura/Stewart Island, and has helped save a number of other species on the Sey­chelles, Mauritius and Christmas Island. No other conservationist in the world has been directly involved in as many bird res­cues as Merton, says Christoph Imboden, a former director of BirdLife Interna­tional, a global conservation agency. And no other bird has provided Merton with such a challenge as the kākāpō.

This flightless oddity was once abun­dant throughout New Zealand, from sea level to the snow line. “The birds used to be in dozens round the camp, screeching and yelling like a lot of demons, and at times it was impossible to sleep for the noise,” wrote the West Coast explorer Charlie Douglas. On moonlit nights, he continued, you could shake a tree and the kākāpō would fall down like apples. Hawkes Bay farmer and naturalist Herbert Guthrie-Smith claimed that “the diggers lived on them” in the Takaka Valley, prais­ing the delicious and fruity white meat for being “as good eating as a barnyard fowl”. Another writer added: “In Otago during the construction of a certain road, the Night Parrot was slaughtered in great numbers, one bird making ‘a plenteous meal for two men’.”

Today, there are only 62 birds left—26 females and 36 males—each with a name, a radio transmitter and a long history of medical check-ups. Banished from their natural range, they survive only on a few remote offshore islands: Whenua Hou/ Codfish Island, off Stewart Island, Te Hoiere/Maud Island, in the Marlborough Sounds, and various temporary holding is­lands—natural fortresses guarded by the sea. Hence the exercises in surf rescue, the life-raft scenarios and the simulated helicopter crashes, because even getting to these islands can be an adventure. It is a measure of the kākāpō’s plight that the conservation staff responsible for its well­being even engage in war-game manoeu­vres that simulate an attempt to kidnap the birds from their sanctuaries. Kākāpō have become so precious that their caretakers leave nothing to chance.

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No other creature in the pantheon of New Zealand’s endemic fauna has ever attracted so much attention, effort and funding, and none is more critically endangered and vulnerable. Yet for all the kākāpō’s ecological charisma and PR ce­lebrity, few people ever get it in the wild—and not just because its sanctuaries are out of bounds to all but key personnel. You could walk its island forests and scrublands for days and never see a bird. The kākāpō evolved with blind and total faith in its perfect camouflage, and the birds blend into the foliage so well that trying to see them is like picking the 3D shapes out of Magic Eye pictures.

Chris Hughes, who worked as a kākāpō volunteer in Fiordland in the early 1980s, told me how he once radio-tracked and pinpointed a bird to a single bush, then looked hard until his eyes hurt but still could not see it. And then the kākāpō blinked, and the movement betrayed it. The bird was sitting, Hughes recalled, at eye level, less than an arm’s reach away. The “freeze and blend in” self-preservation strategy worked well against New Zealand’s eagle-vision raptors, but against introduced tree-climbing predators that hunted by smell, such behaviour was the kākāpō’s undoing.

“If the bird only knew its powers, it wouldn’t fall such an easy prey [to] stoats and ferrets,” Charlie Douglas wrote in his diaries. “One grasp of his powerful claws would crush either of those animals, but he has no idea of attack or defence.”

There was once a similar bird—similar in circumstances and certain aspects of be­haviour, not in appearance—which lived in what is now Mauritius, a plateau of vol­canic cones east of Madagascar roughly the size of Stewart Island. Like the kākāpō, the bird was endemic and a giant of its kind. Too heavy to fly, it walked every­where and nested on the ground, leaving its young unguarded because the island was still a garden that knew no Cain. (God first made Mauritius, then modelled heaven on it, Mark Twain would later write.) Like the kākāpō, the bird was nu­merous, widespread and long-lived but a slow and infrequent breeder, which meant it could not bounce back quickly once its population had been dented.

To the first people who saw it, armed with hunting clubs and driven by hunger, the bird was as outlandish as it was fear­less, though its fearlessness was not cour­age, rather an innocent incomprehension of what was coming its way. Like the kākāpō, too, the bird made exceptionally good eating, and that ultimately led to its demise. It vanished so rapidly and com­pletely that no stuffed specimen exists and we don’t even know the colour of its plumage. We have condensed its sad story into a sound-bite collocation that tolls like the epitome of finality: dead as a dodo.

And so, 300 years later, the story of the kākāpō is one of deja vu, almost right up to its mournful finale. We might well now be saying “dead as a kākāpō” were it not for a handful of dedicated New Zealanders who are determined not to see a repeat of the dodo story on our shores. For the past four decades, in an effort unprecedented in the annals of conservation, they have been bat­tling to preserve the species. It has been largely a losing battle: a steep decline in numbers halted perilously close to extinction, the remaining population stable but ageing, and time steadily running out. Recently, however, the tide has turned. And not a moment too soon, according to Don Merton, who has been at the forefront of the effort for the past 28 years, because, as he says: “If we can’t save the kākāpō, our flagship species and number one conser­vation priority, what hope is there for all the other, less glamorous critters?”

The decline of the kākāpō is textbook stuff. Māori hunted it with gusto, and their dogs and the kiore they introduced deci­mated the population. By the time Euro­peans arrived the bird was largely gone from the North Island. The new immi­grants, with their entourage of pets and vermin, accelerated the decline, and by the early decades of the 20th century the kākāpō had become extremely rare in the South Island as well.

Faced with the imminent extinction of the species, the Wildlife Service (pred­ecessor of the Department of Conserva­tion) organised over 60 search expeditions between 1949 and 1973, some in north­west Nelson and the Tararua Range, but most of them in Fiordland. The inaccess­ible southern mountains, where beech for­ests cling to near-vertical valley walls and often, overloaded with rain or snow, peel off like wet wallpaper, had only just yielded up the “lost” takahē, and it soon be­came apparent they could be the final bas­tion of the kākāpō as well. In the 1960s, five birds, all male, were trapped in Tutuko Valley, near Milford Sound, and another one in Sinbad Gully, under Mitre Peak, but as almost nothing was known about their habits and needs, all died at the Mt Bruce Native Bird Reserve in Wairarapa (recently renamed the Mt Bruce National Wildlife Centre).

Not until February 1974 was another kākāpō discovered. By then it had been established that the birds favoured so-called kākāpō gardens—areas where the beech forest had been broken up by an avalanche, creating conditions for faster-growing herbs, tussocks and berry plants to flourish. In one such area, Esperance Valley, Don Merton heard a kākāpō call­ing and managed to record its voice. He played back this skraark call further down the valley, and the results were astonish­ing. A cacophony of rebuttals burst from the scrub: shrieks and screams, donkey brays and pig squeals, rooster crows and cat purrs—the vocalisations of a single excited kākāpō.

It took another two weeks to trap the bird, which was named Jonathan Livingston Kākāpō. He was a sorry-look­ing thing, old and bedraggled, but his dis­covery gave renewed hope that the species could be saved. There followed a period of even more intense searches, with newly introduced helicopters allowing easy ac­cess to the kākāpō’s eyries high on the flanks of the Fiordland mountains, where the remnant mainland population was making its final stand.

Three more years of combing the region for sounds and signs resulted in 17 birds and a mystery. The searchers had found networks of immaculately kept tracks punctuated with half-metre-wide bowls, their edges trimmed to perfection. It was, one of the finders, Rod Morris, recalled, as if archaeologists had stumbled across the ruins of an ancient civilisation swallowed by the forest. Suddenly, the Māori lore which told of a whawharua—a hollow where each tribe of kākāpō gath­ered to perform unusual nightly rituals—began making more sense. Could these elaborate constructions have something to do with breeding?

There was one more sound that so far had gone unrecorded—a sound as of someone blowing across the top of an empty milk bottle with the power of a fog horn and the regularity of a heartbeat.

This was the male kākāpō booming—sit­ting inside the amphi­theatre of his bowl, in­flated into a feathered balloon, sending out a pulsing, low-frequency love call. The bowls were often fashioned and positioned in such a way that the rock wall surrounding them acted as reflec­tors and amplifiers, di­recting the calls down and across the valleys. O0000m! O0000m! O0000m! The long-wave hum could travel up to five kilometres and curve round ob­stacles. It carried on like a tribal drum through the Fiordland summer nights.

Alas, the booming went unanswered. All 18 birds found and caught in Fiordland turned out to be males. There were possibly no females left. If that were so, technically speaking the species was extinct. The last booming was heard in two valleys near Milford Sound in 1987. Then the kākāpō gardens fell silent.

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All was not lost, however, for in a mi­raculous reprise the kākāpō would get a second chance. While the Fiordland booming was fading, a 200-strong population of kākāpō was discov­ered in the south of Stewart Island, appar­ently untroubled by introduced predators.

In 1977, in an area which came to be called Arena Ridge, searchers found a network of 23 freshly used track-and-bowl systems. This arena, the biologists concluded, was a kind of a kākāpō nightclub where the males would gather—often walking from several kilometres away—to boom and prance and display, each in his own manicured “court” or mini-territory, hoping to lure in an elu­sive female. But nobody had seen a female since the early 1900s.

Merton and his colleagues were becom­ing increasingly alarmed by the absence of females in this all-old-boys fraternity. Then, in 1980, came the long-awaited breakthrough. While searching near camp, a spaniel named Jasper picked up a kākāpō scent and led its handler, Gary Aburn, to the bird, which was smaller, more slender and greener than all others previously caught. Merton examined the pattern of splotches on its primary feathers—a method of distinguishing the sexes of par­rots. The new bird, named Mandy, did not have the telltale male mottling on the tips of its primaries. It was a female—the first identified since the time of pioneering kākāpō conservationist Richard Henry.

Soon more were found, and then their nests and chicks. The fate of the species had finally turned for the better; but this time, too, the jubilations would be short-lived. Mandy was never seen again, and, as the search for more kākāpō continued, it began turning up not only live birds but, more and more frequently, their half-eaten carcasses.

Feral cats had developed a taste for kākāpō, and within five years these bushwise and feisty predators halved the remaining kākāpō population. Just as in Fiordland, searchers realised they were rid­ing a bow-wave of extinction. This time, however, they would take more radical measures.

Between 1982 and 1992, all 61 surviving Stewart Island kākāpō were caught and transferred to safe island sanctuaries: Whenua Hou, Te Hoiere/Maud Island and Hauturu/Little Barrier Island, in the Hauraki Gulf . The kākāpō’s wild days were over. From now on, constant inter-island trans­fers and airlifts out of trouble would be­come the norm in kākāpō life. While a long-term solution to their predicament was being sought, the birds would remain refugees in their own homeland.

One evening in early April 1999, as the seasons were turning and winter storms were edging in from the Southern Ocean, I walked with photographer Rod Morris through wet rimu forest down from the summit of Whenua Hou. We each car­ried a plastic cat box housing a kākāpō. The boxes were heavy, and every few hun­dred metres we stopped to swap hands and to catch a glimpse of the birds: a youngster named Sirocco in Morris’s cage, a female called Hoki in mine.

The birds had just been ferried in from Pearl Island—at the entrance of Port Pegasus, on the eastern side of Stewart Island—their temporary home while 1396-hectare Whenua Hou Nature Reserve was being purged of any remaining ver­min. Back in the mid-1980s, possums had been eradicated from Whenua Hou, and even egg-stealing weka removed, and now, hav­ing been blitzed with 22 air-dropped tonnes of poison pellets, the island had been declared a predator-free “kākāpōrium”—the safest haven the birds would ever know.

At the release site I opened the grille door of my cage and Hoki stomped out angrily, dragging her brown tail like a hand-baggage trolley, and vanished in the undergrowth. Hoki was the star of several media appearances in the early 1990s when, rescued as a starving chick from Whenua Hou, she became the first ever kākāpō to be successfully hand-reared. (She also fea­tured on the cover of Issue 15 of New Zealand Geographic.) She is a free agent now, and tends to shun human company.

On the other hand, Sirocco, also hand-reared, was in no hurry to leave. Once out of his box, he shuffled up a horizontal branch level with my face and stretched his legs in a ballerina-like posture, using his wings for balance. His wings looked capa­ble of carrying the bird away in flight, but of course they weren’t. Kākāpō flap their wings only to get more climbing momentum or to arrest a jump from a tree.

I reached out slowly and Sirocco tasted my hand with his stubby beak, perhaps checking if it contained a morsel of his favourite kumara, then leapt on to my arm and cramponed up to perch on my shoul­der. His flat, owl-like face had wide, brown discs around the eyes, and his beak was almost lost amid feathery whiskers. He stretched out to reach a fresh shoot of a creeping fern, then—Crrrunch! Crrrunch! Chomp! Chomp!—he began to munch nois­ily. As his fruity scent wafted past my nos­trils, I could see why the DOC kākāpō recovery team is inundated with applica­tions from those wanting to work with the bird. Such is the competition for places on the team that even unpaid volunteers of­ten have degrees in zoology and ecological science.

Not that the “-ologies” are of much use when working with this avian nonpareil. Saving the species has become something of a mathematical riddle, an act of rebalancing the equation so that the birds breed faster than they die out. But, as kākāpō workers have discovered, creating safe havens and putting all the adult birds together does not necessarily add up to the production of more kākāpō.

Kākāpō are notoriously slow breeders, their courtships and matings about as frequent as the Olympic Games. The dis­covery of the track-and-bowl systems in Fiordland led Merton and his then-protégé Rod Morris to propose that kākāpō displayed courtship behaviour called lekking, similar to that of some birds of paradise, pheasants and grouse and the capercaillie. No other parrot, and no other flightless bird, behaves in this way.

Unable to monopolise or defend large territories, males of lekking species gather in prominent areas and set up miniature “courts”, often in close proximity, and dis­play competitively to any females. There is a lot of mock fighting and mucho macho braggadocio. Although unique to the kākāpō among New Zealand birds, the ritual is familiar to city-dwellers. Every Friday night you can see it in the lek downtown, where young bucks drive around in their souped-up cars, their subwoofers booming out a hopeful techno beat to attract watching females.

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One of the few people to have seen a male kākāpō displaying is Rod Morris, whose sense for being in the right places at the most opportune times has led him from the ranks of the Wildlife Service to the elite of world-class natural history filmmakers and photographers. (A number of his images appear in this story.) One night in Fiordland’s Sinbad Gully, lighting his way with a red-filtered torch, Morris stepped into a track-and-bowl sys­tem and a kākāpō began to dance for him. In Wild South, a book he co-authored, Morris recounted: “The bird spread its wings like a butterfly, and began waving them slowly. He clicked his beak and started swaying from one foot to the other. He lowered his head, and rhythmi­cally treading the ground on alternate feet began slowly moving towards me, coming closer and closer until he was only about two metres away. Then he began turning around, still coming towards me, only now he was walking backwards! He rocked from one foot to the other until his tail touched my boot and then he just stopped, with his back towards me, his head low­ered, and his wings widespread—they were intricately patterned like the wings of a moth or the tail of a peacock.” For the rest of the night the kākāpō followed Mor­ris around, dancing again and again, but instantly losing interest in him every time he stepped outside the display area.

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Finding out just what triggers the lekking—and the breeding—has been one of the cruxes of kākāpō re­covery, a brain-twister with multiple variables. The most consistent prompt for breeding is the intense fruiting, or masting, of plants rich in turpentine: rimu on Whenua Hou and perhaps kauri on Hauturu/Little Barrier Island. Supple­mentary feeding helps keep the birds in good condition, and hence more likely to breed, so the birds are now regularly of­fered specially designed pellets made of a mixture of nuts and seeds. Extra food is crucial in years when breeding is triggered by mast fruiting but the fruit aborts before ripening. This happened on Whenua Hou in 1992, and the chicks starved.

But there are still surprises, and not even Merton claims to fully understand the com­plexities of kākāpō breeding. In early 1999, while on hold at Pearl Island, five females nested and produced 14 eggs. In the same season, Lisa, the last female kākāpō remain­ing on Hauturu—who had not been seen for 13 years—was rediscovered incubating three eggs. Six juveniles survived, includ­ing four females—the best recruitment in the history of the rescue programme.

Over the years, this programme has been through some shaky times, partly because there are still so many unknowns about the birds, but also because of the hobbling ef­fects of political pressure and bureaucratic constraints. Following an external review in 1994, executive control over budget, strategy, staff and all things kākāpō was put in the hands of three people: Paul Jansen, Graeme Elliott and Merton—all of whom have clocked up many years in grassroots conservation. Jansen, the programme leader, has quietly emphatic manners and the reputation of a man who gets things done. Elliott, the team’s scientist, is a thinker and electronics tinkerer, responsi­ble for much of the innovative technology now employed in the field. Merton, with unrivalled knowledge and experience of kākāpō, is the prime architect of the close-order management strategy for the birds, adapted from his black robin work. Since 1995, the trio has put the kākāpō on a fast track to recovery—well, fast in kākāpō terms.

In the avian world, where life is but a short sprint, kākāpō are the marathon run­ners—possibly the longest lived of all birds. Many of those alive today were al­ready mature adults when they were found in the mid-1970s, and biologists estimate a typical kākāpō life span to be around 60 years, perhaps more. Like tuatara, they seem timeless. Their metabolism is so un­hurried they can digest foods containing toxins that would kill humans or make them sick, like the leaves and fruit of the native tutu, and poroporo berries—both kākāpō favourites.

And still the bizarre night parrots keep surprising their caretakers. Graeme Elliott, in an effort to breathe a little more enthusiasm into the birds’ courtship, has tried injecting selected rimu trees with a hormone to induce the trees to produce more fruit—so far the most consistent kākāpō aphrodisiac. He has also developed a “boom box”—a portable, weatherproof stereo system which, placed near a lek, automatically comes on at night, blaring out the boom! boom! sound to spur the males into song.

In 1998, kākāpō bred successfully on Te Hoiere/Maud Island—but without the benefit of a boom box and without a rimu tree in sight.

The event on Maud was all the more significant for taking place in an extremely modified environment, showing that, de­spite appearing to be stuck in an ecologi­cal time warp, the kākāpō is an adaptable creature. Maud Island is the 309-hectare tip of a mountain that was flooded when the sea level rose. It was farmed until 1975, when the Royal New Zealand Forest and Bird Society successfully campaigned to buy it and turn it into a nature reserve. Most of the island had been cleared of its original forest, and one corner had been planted in pines. Remarkably, it was in the radiata that the kākāpō nested.

By late December 1998, all four of Maud’s males were booming, and soon mating signs—tufts of down and feathers near the track-and-bowl area—were found. Then, on the island’s west-facing slope, where the setting sun dapples through the trees and brown pine needles muffle one’s footsteps, Merton and others discovered a nest with three eggs under sparse bracken cover on a slope so steep the subsequent track cut up it was a wind­ing staircase of 140 steps.

The find was such a momentous event that Merton and his colleagues took no chances with the safety of their charges. The three chicks that hatched were off­spring of Richard Henry, the last and only known surviving Fiordland kākāpō. “We’ve waited more than 20 years for this nest,” Merton said at the time. “It must succeed!” And so the intervention began. Every time the mother, named Flossie, left the nest to forage—generally at around 2 or 3am—a stealthy construc­tion crew moved in.

First, a metre-high retaining wall was erected on the lower side of the nest to prevent the eggs from rolling down the hill. Next a plywood roof was added. Then a drain was dug on the upslope to divert any possible flooding. A piece of plastic pipe became an entrance tunnel, and an infra-red beam, wired to a door chime, was placed across the entrance to alert nest minders when the mother left for her nightly perambulations. A mini­ature video surveillance camera was placed inside the nest to keep an electronic eye on the chicks. Later, a play­ground was added. It was as if a person living in a shanty had left for a short walk and returned to find a prefab house with a sundeck, and a sand pit for the kids.

Not showing the least surprise, Flossie and the youngsters took the alterations in their goosestep stride. All the while, a roster of nest minders camped in a tent 80 metres away, ready to dash in to deal with any emergency. Electronic surveillance and nest minding would become standard procedure with all subsequent nests.

Under this intensive management re­gime 12 juveniles were raised in three seasons, bringing the population to 62 birds. Then things went quiet on the kākāpō front. Two years passed after my walk in the Whenua Hou forest with Rod Morris to release Hoki and Sirocco. Merton travelled to the Seychelles on an­other threatened-species rescue mission. Elliott was back in his shed tinkering with more electronic wizardry. He and Jansen refined the makeshift Maud Island nest-minding system into a ready-to-go Nest Kit, which, as well as the nonstop infra­red surveillance system, featured a panic button in the nest-minders’ tent which would set off an explosion of smoke and noise in the nest, frightening away any nosy predators. There was also—a homely touch—a miniature electric blanket with a thermostat and a fleece pillowcase to keep the eggs and, if they needed it, the chicks warm during their mother’s absences.

Elliott’s piece de resistance is called Snark, a kind of kākāpō radar which indi­vidually logs every bird that passes within a 10-metre radius. Placed in an active court­ship area, this minicomputer keeps track of visiting females, alerting staff of possi­ble matings. When positioned next to a supplementary feeding station, it records which birds feed and for how long. The platform from which a kākāpō can reach its favourite morsels is also an electronic weighing station.

Not that all the kākāpō gear is so high-tech. Merton’s preferred rat bait is a con­coction of cereal, white chocolate and the anticoagulant brodifacoum, dished into one of Mrs Merton’s muffin tins and coated with candle wax for waterproof­ing. His tool for extracting kākāpō eggs and chicks from hard-to-reach nests is a modified spaghetti strainer taped to the end of a telescopic ski pole. This balance of the new and the old, a blend of the micro­chip and the Swannie, has worked well, and for the past two years it has been fine-tuned while everyone waited for the kākāpō to decide to breed again.

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In January 2001, the word from Whenua Hou was that the coming summer season could be “it”—the big one. A bumper crop of rimu fruit was starting to develop, so the recovery team moved into high gear, bringing all 21 females of breeding age on to the island.

In September, the birds were retrained to lift the lids of the supplementary feed hoppers—an essential precaution in case the rimu crop failed, as it had on all three previous masting occasions. More than 100 volunteers was rostered to take two-week stints as nest minders through the critical period of February to May 2002.

“This is our moment of truth,” Merton told me. “For the first time ever we have all the odds on our side. We have the biggest rimu crop we have ever seen on the island developing, all the known females have been assembled to capitalise on the event, we know we can protect the nests, and, thanks to Comalco [which sponsors the kākāpō programme] we have the resources to achieve success.” And so 2002 is shaping up to be the year of the kākāpō, with Whenua Hou poised to become one boom­ing maternity ward. But whatever the out­come of the season, Jansen, Merton and Elliott are already looking ahead.

“Threatened-species managers here and around the world are getting better at averting extinction and maintaining de­pleted populations,” Merton explained, “but success usually entails expensive, la­bour-intensive, ongoing intervention—and that puts enormous pressure on people and resources. We have to find lasting solu­tions if we are to succeed as conservation­ists. We have to get these animals into situ­ations where they are free-living and self-sustaining.”

Kākāpō are a case in point. “A great many people have devoted time, energy and money to saving the kākāpō, but if this human prop were to be withdrawn for whatever reason—financial, social or po­litical—then those decades of good work could very quickly be undone and the bird lost.” That is why the three-man kākāpō junta is adamant it must find a permanent solution to the kākāpō challenge. Says Elliott: “We are working hard to put our­selves out of work.” Recently, they have come up with a plan as visionary as it is controversial.

In November 2001, Merton flew to Whenua Hou from his Wellington base to prepare for the coming breeding season. I met him in transit, at Invercargill air­port, and he let me in on the lat­est thinking.

“Kākāpō are extinct through­out their natural range,” he be­gan, “and there is no way of re­turning them there, at least in the short to me­dium term. If they are to sur­vive in a free-liv­ing state, then it must be outside their former range. But where? It is fair to expect that the number of kākāpō will steadily, if slowly, increase, and that the small islands where they are being kept will soon reach their holding capacity. What are we going to do then? There aren’t many options, because kākāpō need a lot of space, and a self-sustaining popu­lation of several hundred birds would re­quire many thousands of hectares. They cannot coexist with predatory mammals, so the mainland is out, and they need a dominant masting plant species in order to breed. We’re looking at all the possi­bilities—including the subantarctic.”

His eyes had the gleam of a man who sees a prize which is not yet within his grasp.

“Campbell?” I asked.

“It’s a candidate, and a good one. It is large—over 11,000 hectares—and after last year’s rat eradication project it should now be free of all alien mammals. It has a wide variety of plants, including abundant snow tussock, which could provide the necessary high-energy food to enable kākāpō to breed. The climate shouldn’t worry them. Kākāpō are adapted to cool, damp, subalpine conditions. Their down is particularly dense, and under their skin they have a layer of fat up to 15 millimetres thick.”

Placing the birds so far outside their former range might seem a form of banish­ment, Merton admitted, but it would also be like putting our feathery treasures on term deposit in a safe offshore bank, where no calamity and no fund-cutting or staff downsizing could affect them.

Merton reminded me that the Chatham Islands black robin, once the rarest bird in the world, no longer depends on precious conservation dollars for its survival, but thrives in two self-sustaining populations without management. “We absolutely must do the same for kākāpō,” he said.

I listened eagerly and soaked up his ra­diant enthusiasm, for it seemed that his lifetime task of seeing the kākāpō through its crisis might be nearing completion. Later, I walked with him to the small plane that would whisk this 62-year-old battler, with his shy smile and big backpack, to where he was happiest—among his big green parrots.

As I drove away I thought of Douglas Adams, the literary hitchhiker of the gal­axy, who in 1989 went on a whirlwind tour to see some of the world’s most iconic threatened species. He wrote a book about his experiences, called Last Chance to See, which contains a chapter on kākāpō. Adams rushed to New Zealand to see the kākāpō before it disappeared, but as it has turned out he needn’t have hurried. Here, thanks to Merton, his Wildlife Service and DOC colleagues and an army of volunteers, the rerun of the dodo story looks set to have a happy ending. “If you look [a kākāpō] in its large, round, greeny-brown face,” Adams wrote, “it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right.” Perhaps now, for the first time ever, we can honestly say it will be.

A tale of two Henries

What lonely hours they must have been, walking the empty streets of an Auckland night, hoping for something to go on, an answer, a hint. Forty-eight-year-old bushman Richard Henry was at the end of his tether. His body was broken by lumbago, his heart torn by a rejection from a woman he loved, and the overwhelming sense that his life no longer had any purpose shadowed his mind like a dark cloud. Until now, the Fiordland wilderness where he lived had been a soothing panacea for all his ills, but, like an overused medicine, it had became ineffective. The solitude of the woods had turned into stinging loneliness, and he ran away from it.

It was October 3, 1893. Two months earlier Henry had left his spartan but on stilts at the southern end of lake Te Anau—his home for over a decade—to make a fresh start in life, but on this day, alone in an alien city, he decided that an earlier end would be more timely. He had paid off all his accounts and cleared up his affairs—he was, despite all, a man of integrity. He put a revolver to his head and pulled the trigger.

And an odd thing happened: there was the bang! and the pain, but the life did not end, though Henry felt he had lost the power of his right hand. Perhaps feeling a total failure by now, he fumbled to recock the revolver. Again the cold steel of the muzzle touched his head and his finger pressed the trigger.

This time the gun misfired, and Henry paused for a moment. “… the remnants of superstition made me think I had better put it off to see what would turn up,” he would later write. In the small hours of the morning, he and admitted himself to Auckland Hospital. There, a surgeon found the first bullet flattened against Henry’s robust skull. He extracted it without difficulty.

What did turn up in Henry’s life was Resolution Island and a destiny of such profound importance that no moment of doubt or weakness could revoke it. In May 1891 the government had set aside Resolution Island, at the entrance of Dusky Sound, as a reserve for native flora and fauna, and was now looking for a capable custodian.

Henry was the obvious choice. An Irishman born in County Kildare, he grew up in the New South Wales outback, becoming an expert bushman, a fact he credited to spending most of his formative years among the Aborigines. Out of necessity in such a remote existence, he was a colonial jack-of-all-trades: a farm hand and hunter, a mechanic and boat-builder. He was also a keen naturalist and a meticulous observer of wildlife who, though often dismissed as an amateur by academia, wrote popular newspaper articles about his natural history insights gleaned in the bush.

During his years around Te Anau, Henry grew fond of flightless birds—the kiwi and particularly the kakapo, which he frequently heard on the western side of the lake, drumming “like distant thunder.” Acutely aware of their vulnerability, he voiced his concern about their future. “Had they been undisturbed, with their lack of enemies and abundance of food, they were in a fair way of developing to replace the moas,” he wrote about the kakapo. “As it is they are the easiest things in the world to exterminate. A few wild dogs would clear the country in a decade.”

There were not only dogs, but stoats, ferrets and rats as well—a Pandora’s box of vermin emptied into an innocent land, spreading unseen and deadly. There was no stopping it, Henry realised. All that could be done was to create safe havens for the birds, preferably on remote islands, out of reach of predators. “On the islands the birds may survive for half a century,” he wrote, “and by that time people in every corner of the world will realise their interest and value, and then there will be no fear of their becoming extinct. If we had a pair of live dodos now or even a pair of takihis [sic] they would be valued at almost their weight in diamonds …”

Four months after his attempt at suicide misfired in Auckland, Henry would get an opportunity to make his vision reality, to become a collector and keeper of New Zealand’s feathered treasures. As curator and caretaker of Resolution Island he would capture flightless birds from the many arms of Dusky Sound and relocate them to the newly formed reserve. The waves of vermin were rippling into even the most remote corners of the country, and this gave Henry’s mission a sense of urgency, breathing new vigour and purpose into his life.

He moved to Dusky Sound in July 1894 and built a but on a tiny peninsula in the lee of Pigeon Island, within rowing distance of the Resolution reserve. It was the remotest of outposts, lashed by frequent storms and soused with rain. On rare occasions in the depth of sunless winter, the arms of the fiord would disappear under a veneer of ice, and for the most part the 14 years Henry would spend there would be a life in oilskins and perpetual dampness.

Despite the harsh climate and a crippling lack of funds—he had to pay a field assistant out of his own pocket—Henry made good progress. His but became a house, and he built a capstan and a boatshed thatched with kiekie, and also a storehouse. He repaired his old sailing boat, Putangi, and cut access tracks through the mountain forest. Then the relocation of birds began in earnest.

For four years Henry worked feverishly, combing the forests with his muzzled dogs, capturing the birds—mainly kakapo, but also the little spotted and the South Island brown kiwi, which he called “roa”—and ferrying them to the island sanctuary when the weather allowed. His dogs were able to detect kakapo scent a quarter of a mile away, he wrote, and they would locate all the birds in the first sweep of an area. Even six months later it was a waste of time to go over the same ground again. In any case, kakapo were still plentiful, and in the course of his work Henry would observe and handle more of them than any other person in history.

By November 1898, he had relocated 572 kakapo and kiwi and believed Resolution Island had probably reached its capacity. His task seemed accomplished, the sanctuary established. But then the unthinkable happened. In March 1900, visitors from a passing schooner reported seeing a weka being chased by a “weasel” (most likely a stoat, in fact)—on the beach of Resolution Island!

Henry was thunderstruck, and at first thought a joke was being played at his expense. But in August of that year he himself saw the creature—”quite a little thing, no bigger than a rat”—and became obsessed with trapping the villain. “I have been out 91 days after the weasel,” he wrote to his superior in Dunedin, but six more years would pass before he managed to catch the animal. By then he realised his treasure vault had been invaded and plun­dered. Again the spectre of failure appeared before him, for his life’s work was going to waste before his eyes. It really was: a 1980 search on Resolution Island turned up not a single sign of a kakapo.

Henry’s spirit sank to a new low as the wave of main­land extinction engulfed his sanctuary. The morning chorus was silenced and kakapo became increasingly rare. Those kakapo he did find were usually in an emaciated state, “poor spiritless things—just skin and bone.” Henry took consolation in writing, recording images of an era that was coming to a close.

He left Dusky shortly after his 63rd birthday, in 1908, and, after a three-year stint as caretaker of Kapiti Island, retired to Katikati, in the Bay of Plenty, and later to Helensville. There he was befriended by the postmaster, Alexander Robertson, whose daily visits broke the mo­notony of hermit life. By November 1929, Henry’s health had deteriorated rapidly, and he died, a lone and forgotten man, at the age of 84. The postmaster was the only person to attend his funeral.

Henry and his work would have drifted into oblivion had it not been for the strength and the clarity of his vision. “He was years ahead of his time, and we spent many days, tent-bound by storms in Fiordland, learning from his reports,” says Don Merton, who, half a century later, picked up Henry’s work. “His writings were like a Bible to us, and Henry became almost another member of our kakapo team, absent in person but always offering his experience.”

Henry was a pioneer, and his hard-won contribution was of enormous importance, Merton says. Developed and refined, his strategy of island translocation has been turned into a major weapon against extinction—the mainstay of endangered species conservation in New Zealand and a blueprint for conservation of oceanic island faunas from Mauritius to the Galapagos. “At least five New Zealand bird species—translocated to safe islands beyond their natural range and beyond that of introduced mamma­lian carnivores—owe their existence to Henry’s innova­tion,” Merton says.

Fittingly, it was Merton and his colleagues who would give the sad tale of Richard Henry an upbeat finale. In 1975, at the end of a long day’s search for the few surviving Fiordland kakapo on a narrow terrace high above the Gulliver River, the tracking dogs picked up a scent and cornered a bird against the edge of a cliff that dropped a thousand metres to the valley floor. It was a precarious situation, with the kakapo about to retreat over the edge of the precipice. Without hesitation, Merton made a goalie’s dive and caught the bird with both hands, literally on the brink.

It proved a timely save, for the bird turned out to be the last known individual from the New Zealand mainland. Its life would be an island odyssey—seven years on Maud, another 14 on Little Barrier, then back to Maud, where, six years on-27 years in total—it still survives.

While on Maud, the old parrot became enamoured of a Stewart Island female named Flossie, and with her produced three offspring, including one critically needed female to perpetuate precious genes from the mainland race. The event demonstrated that kakapo are sufficiently adaptable to survive and breed in an alien environment—a small, heavily modified island—and was thus a turning point in kakapo recovery.

But in 1975, for the captors of the last Fiordland kakapo, all this was yet to come. Somehow, almost prophetically, they named that bird Richard Henry.

Derek Grzelewski

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