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and good fortune to find pockets of predator-free refuge elsewhere in their shrinking universe. While those birds stranded in hostile territory and lacking the option of flight more often suffered the ultimate demise. And none more infamously than one tiny songbird named the Stephens Island wren.
    T HE L EGEND OF T IBBLES
    The Stephens Island wren was a tiny flightless species that within a year of its discovery was extinguished at the paws of one lighthouse keeper’s cat named Tibbles. Thus reads the popular legend of what is commonly claimed as the only known instance of a single individual driving a species to extinction. What actually befell the Stephens Island wren was a bit more involved, if ultimately no less catastrophic.
    In 1892 work crews came to build a lighthouse on Stephens Island, an otherwise uninhabited square mile of wilderness in Cook Strait, at the northern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. In 1894, sometime after the lighthouse began operating, a cat belonging to one of the new residents started coming home with little dead birds in its mouth. An assistant lighthouse keeper and amateur naturalist named David Lyall skinned one and sent it to the ornithologist Walter Buller. The sight of the skin excited Buller, as that of a bird “entirely distinct from anything hitherto known.” The elated ornithologist wrote Lyall, “There is probably nothing so refreshing to the soul of a naturalist as the discovery of a new species.”
    As the news of the curious new wren of Stephens Island spread, the celebrations turned sordid. There was fame and fortune riding on the head of the unique little bird. Buller, an ardent collector and profiteer, started plying Lyall for more birds. So did Henry Travers, a natural history entrepreneur and a noted broker of such rarities. The shrewd Travers secretly talked Lyall into diverting the specimens his way, and thereafter began offering them not only to Buller but to Buller’s chief rival, the famously well-to-do bird collector Walter Rothschild.
    The wren was truly something else. It had long legs and hardly any wings. Lyall, perhaps the only man since the ancient M ā ori ever to see the bird alive, sent word that it ran like a mouse and didn’t fly. Taxonomists later examining the museum specimens found its flight equipment all but jettisoned. Its wing bones had shortened, its flight feathers been rendered aerodynamically unfit, its breastbone—to which its major flight muscles would have otherwise attached—withered to nearly nothing. The Stephens Island wren never flew; it ran in fits and starts, under cover of darkness. It had indeed become a feathered mouse.
    Which on an island with a cat having nothing better to do made the wren a most appealing sort of game. Not that it was merely one cat doing the killing, as the story usually goes. There was at least a family of them prowling the confines of Stephens Island. (From which they eventually multiplied so profusely that the keepers started shooting them as pests.) Nor was the supposed villain even named Tibbles. (The name seems to have been invented for the sake of good copy.) Nor did he, or she, even belong to Lyall, who was merely the messenger.
    Lyle nonetheless did write Travers of the bird’s impending doom: “The rock wrens are very hard to get, and in a short time there will be none left.” To which Travers responded by raising the asking price in his pitches to Buller and Rothschild. And with the cats doing the killing, and the collectors and profiteers haggling over the carcasses, the little team of conspirators ran through what would turn out to be the first and last of the odd little wrens.
    Within a year of discovery, the Christchurch Press was reporting that “there is very good reason to believe that the bird is no longer to be found on this island, [and] as it is not known to exist anywhere else, it has apparently become quite extinct. This is probably a