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hardly surprising that many cats, having tasted the wild life, never returned to ship. By the turn of the nineteenth century, feral cats could be found across New Zealand, from the coasts to the mountain snow lines.
    So too came the rabbits. Introduced as game in 1864, the rabbits did what rabbits do, and within a decade New Zealand was boiling over with them. They mowed their way through the pastures of the vast sheep empires that had built New Zealand’s new civilization. Sheep starved en masse, sheep farmers clubbed and killed rabbits by the millions, and still the rabbits kept coming, torching the countryside as they went. Rabbits might have ranked as the worst idea in the ecological history of New Zealand, if not for the ensuing harebrained scheme to rid them.
    In their panic to save their sheep from their rabbits, the governing authorities of New Zealand in 1882 began shipping would-be rabbit predators. Three species of lithe, low-slung mammalian carnivores of the Mustelidae family—the ferret (or polecat), the weasel, and the stoat—were gathered up from Great Britain and turned loose on New Zealand. Frenetic, high-energy hunters at home in tight spaces, the mustelids were infamous for their unnerving mix of curiosity and giant-killing savagery. The stoat, at ten ounces, was practiced at grappling with rabbits five times its size, dispatching its prey with a penetrating bite through the back of the skull. But the little carnivore also came with brains, and the common sense to take advantage of any and all trusting songbirds and sitting ducks and grounded parrots that epitomized the New Zealand avifauna.
    Buller, the high-profile bird enthusiast, voiced the naturalist’s outrage over the mustelid liberations. “The legislature having rejected the proposed measure for prohibiting the introduction of polecats and other noxious animals into this colony, nothing now remains for us but to sound the note of warning before it is too late, and by directing public opinion to the subject, to mitigate the danger of our being overrun with one of the worst of predaceous vermin.”
    All such warnings duly ignored, the New Zealand authorities went on shipping mustelids. And as predicted, the immigrants took to stuffing their larders with New Zealand’s trusting avifauna, while the rabbits went on ravaging the sheep range.
    To which the sheep lobby responded with the stupendous logic of introducing more foreign predators. They rounded up cats from town, tossing them like grenades upon their rabbit-ravaged fields. And onward the rabbits and stoats and cats merrily marched. Finally, in 1939, in a darkly comical parody of closing the barn door behind the missing horse, the bumbling new colonists of New Zealand, with their country in ecological tatters, enacted a useless bounty on stoats, offering two shillings a tail.
    By then, half of the native bird species of New Zealand were gone, and nearly half of the survivors were circling the drain. By the 1890s explorers and collectors heading into the glaciated peaks and valleys of Fiordland were finding the supposed wilderness already ransacked. Those accustomed to traveling light and growing fat off the land now faced starvation in deserted forests. The birds that they had once so blithely gathered with guns and dogs and sticks, birds that had once eaten out of their hands, were no longer to be found.
    â€œThe Digger with his Dogs, Cats, Rats, Ferrets and Guns has nearly exterminated the Birds in the lower reaches of the southern rivers,” reported the explorer Charles Douglas, whose own crews had once pillaged their way through this virgin territory, piling up hundreds more birds than they could eat, and leaving the rest to rot. “The cry of the Kiwi is never heard and a Weka is a rarity. The Blue Duck once so green, is as carefull of himself as the Grey and the Robins are extinct.”
    Those few species that endured the invasion owed much to their wings