A heroic early conservationist
Many milestone moments in natural history happened around the remote, bush-clad coasts of Fiordland and Rakiura/Stewart Island – but they’re some of the least-visited places in the country. Kate Evans reports.
On Pigeon Island, in the shadow of the mighty bulk of Resolution Island in Fiordland’s Tamatea/Dusky Sound, there’s a poignant ruin. A few mosscovered bricks where a house once stood. Nearby, an enclosure made of broken ponga logs, shaggy with greenery, poking up at angles like a row of broken teeth or a ring of ancient standing stones.
More than a century ago, the house belonged to Richard Henry – bearded, 50-something, a loner – and the square of logs was a pen for kiwi and ka¯ka¯po¯.
Henry was a proto-ranger, carrying out New Zealand’s first bird translocations. In 1894 he was given the task of rescuing endangered birds from the stoatinfested Fiordland mainland and transferring them to Resolution Island, the fifth largest island in New Zealand, then presumed to be out of reach of swimming mammalian predators.
When I landed on Pigeon Island’s little beach in an inflatable Zodiac, I could picture Henry here in his wool cardigan, talking to the weka and his dog, feeding a seven-gilled shark in the bay, and beginning each day sharing breakfast with a piopio – now extinct – which would hop through the window at his whistle and eat his oatmeal.
Richard Henry spent 14 years living on Pigeon Island, and transferred more than 700 kiwi and ka¯ka¯po¯ from the mainland onto Resolution. Tragically, in 1900, he saw a ‘‘weasel’’ – probably a stoat – on the shore, and realised all his labours had been in vain. Today, the place feels like a memorial to Henry, a mossy tribute to his immense effort, and broken heart. But there’s hope, too: flitting around his old house now is a tı¯eke, South Island saddleback, snatched from the jaws of extinction by researchers inspired by Henry’s writings. As I walk the forest trails he once used, birds appear one by one like they’ve been choreographed to impress me: a curious robin, a raucous ka¯ka¯, a tomtit. On other nearby islands, kiwi and ka¯ka¯po¯ are making a comeback.
In many ways, conservation in New Zealand began here. In fact, many milestone moments in history and natural history happened around the remote, bush-clad coasts of Fiordland and nearby Rakiura/Stewart Island – but they’re some of the least-visited places in the country.
For a week, I was a guest on tour company Heritage Expeditions’ week-long trip of the region, hoping to see some of the places I’d read and written about over the years, but never seen.
Heritage Expeditions began here, too. In 1977, Rodney Russ led the Wildlife Service team that rediscovered dozens of ka¯ka¯po¯ surviving in the remote valleys of Stewart Island’s Tin Range. Until then, scientists only knew of around 15 remaining birds in Fiordland, and they were all male. Crucially, the Stewart Island population included 29 females, who became the mothers and grandmothers of today’s 209 surviving ka¯ka¯po¯. Russ went on to help save the black robin and other endangered birds, then formed a tour company to share these stories – and
New Zealand’s wild and remote places – with members of the public.
‘‘Dad wanted to ensure they weren’t locked up,’’ says his son Nathan Russ, the expedition leader on my trip, who now runs the company along with his brother Aaron. ‘‘We’ve fought to maintain access to these regions so that people can get the opportunity to see them.’’ (People who can afford the pricey fares, anyway, or get a youth scholarship.) Some of the fledgling company’s first trips in the 1980s were around Fiordland in a tiny boat. Over the years they branched out to visit New Zealand’s Subantarctic islands, Antarctica, the Russian Arctic and the Western Pacific islands.
But in March 2020, the Heritage Expeditions voyage from Tauranga to Tokyo was suddenly derailed by the rapid worldwide spread of Covid-19. Borders began shutting. New Caledonia wouldn’t let the ship in; neither would the Solomon Islands or Fiji or Papua New Guinea. Finally, Vanuatu said yes, and the Russes managed to evacuate staff and guests back to Australia and New Zealand literally minutes before the borders slammed shut. The expedition ship – the sturdy Russian-flagged Spirit of Enderby that the company has been using for its trips for decades – has sat idle in Vladivostok ever since.
Nathan Russ says it took seven months of negotiations to persuade the New Zealand Government the necessary systems were in place to avoid a Covid outbreak. The Russian crew brought the ship across the Pacific, tested negative, and after some rigorous health and security checks, I and my 50 ship-mates – all New Zealanders, mostly grey-haired – hopped aboard in Bluff. It’s probably the only cruise ship operating in the world right now, and Russ and the staff seemed thrilled to be back on the water.
Ibrought two books with me: one published in 2020, the other a battered green hardback from 1914. My companion for Rakiura/Stewart Island was Herbert GuthrieSmith’s endearingly titled Mutton Birds and Other Birds. Guthrie-Smith was a Scottish Hawke’s Bay farmer and early conservationist who wrote a number of books about the natural history of his adopted country. Mutton Birds is a love letter to Stewart Island and its avian inhabitants, and details Guthrie-Smith’s observations and pontifications made during the spring and summer of 1911-1912 on the islets and inlets of Rakiura. ‘‘Some birds are more delightful to watch than others,’’ he wrote, in a chapter which describes the several days he spent watching and photographing a ka¯ka¯riki nest. ‘‘I was never more pleased with myself than during this week on Ulva.’’
We head to Ulva Island, too, anchoring off its long low coast on the first night of the voyage. The following morning we’re ferried ashore in Zodiacs, where Ulva Goodwillie is waiting to meet us on the little jetty at Post Office cove. She is seventhgeneration Rakiura Ma¯ori, and her mother named her after the island after the family moved to Invercargill to ensure an enduring link with this special place. Now, Goodwillie leads a team of guides offering day-trips to Ulva. (You can also visit cheaply by water taxi from Oban.) I join a group led by Matt Jones, the chair of the Ulva Island Trust.
Rats were eradicated in 1997, and it shows. ‘‘Bellbirds were thick about me, choirs of them singing on,’’ wrote GuthrieSmith of Ulva in 1914, and in 2020, their three-note refrain is constant, too. It’s November, the height of the breeding season for many birds, and they are busy wooing and nesting around us. We see mo¯hua/yellowhead high in the rimu trees chasing the sun, and hear ka¯ka¯ making a gurgling call that sounds like water pouring – ‘‘on rainy days it sounds like they’re mocking you,’’ Jones says. Today, the sky above the canopy is a cloudless blue.
At the western end of the island a young male sea lion comes lumbering out of the ocean and charges up to us with bolshy shoulders, like a drunk thug outside a pub. We stand stock-still as he grunts and sniffs us, and eventually slides back into the clear waters of the bay. Jones shows us the thick white leaves of the tree called muttonbird scrub, Brachiglottis rotundifolia. At the turn of the 20th century, when Stewart Island’s only post office was here on Ulva, visitors stuck stamps on the back of these sturdy leaves, scrawled a message and sent them as postcards.
Returning, we spot a pair of tı¯eke, South Island saddlebacks, the male feeding the female: a mating ritual, Jones says, to show he will be a good provider. It’s a miracle these birds are still here at all. By the 1960s, rats had swarmed to almost the last corners of Aotearoa, and South Island saddlebacks survived only on one, rat-free rock: Taukihepa/Big South Cape Island off the bottom of Stewart Island. Taukihepa was also the last refuge of the Stewart Island snipe, the tiny Stead’s bush wren, and the greater shorttailed bat. (Guthrie-Smith recorded them all there in 1913.)
In 1964, muttonbirders reported that the rats had arrived on Big South Cape. Authorities at the time thought native birds would adapt to the presence of predators, but a few in the Wildlife Service disagreed. In a desperate rescue mission, Don Merton and Brian Bell travelled to Taukihepa. When they got there, the rodents had already stripped the forest floor bare of vegetation and eaten the wallpaper in the muttonbirders’ hut. The team captured as many birds as they could, including 36 saddlebacks, two snipe, and six wrens. They never found any bats, the snipe died soon after they were caught, and the wrens didn’t survive translocation to a nearby rat-free island. Three ancient New Zealand bird species went extinct almost overnight. But the saddlebacks made it, and now number in the thousands on more than 20 offshore islands. They were released on Ulva in 2000, and seem to be thriving.
We finish the walk at Sydney Bay, and the sand is as golden as Bondi’s. Back at the jetty, Ulva (the guide) is waiting. She points out a pair of jewel-like ka¯ka¯riki, feeding a clutch of tiny beaks in a hole in a tree. A century ago,
From a remote island in Dusky Sound, right, to the relative bustle of Stewart Island, below, the unvisited bottom of New Zealand is a trove of history and wildlife.
Guthrie
Smith had a soft spot for them, too – though he wrote about the yellow-crowned species, and I saw its redcrowned cousin. The ka¯ka¯riki was ‘‘the most gentle, harmless, kindly little fellow,’’ he wrote. ‘‘His merry span of life is passed between the green spread of treetops and heaven’s blue–the greens and blues he borrows for his plumes.’’
Some of us are put ashore to walk a few hours around to Oban, and we end up in the pub. It’s packed to bursting. Some kind of reality TV show is filming the weekly quiz night, and the bar is crowded with boom mikes, camera operators, and rowdy punters, with my cruise-mates adding to the throng. Normally there’s just a local or two propping up the bar, but since Covid closed off overseas travel, New Zealand’s third island has shot to the top of a few bucket lists.
The next day we explore Port Adventure, on the eastern side of Rakiura, then head into the southern ocean just as the weather turns from calm and golden to wild and windy. We pass the storm-swept Solander Islands/Hautere, a forbidding volcanic fortress off the bottom western corner of the South Island. It’s hard to imagine how the five marooned sealers rescued off the Solanders in 1813 managed to survive there for more than four years. As the islands recede and the light fades, we watch Buller’s albatrosses and diving petrels skim the surging sea.
For the next three days, we’ll explore remote parts of Fiordland, sharing the waters with just a handful of other boats, far from roads and cellphone reception.
In Doubtful Sound, the ship follows the dark wall of Secretary Island, its cliffs plunging more than 1000 metres from the alpine tops to the fjord. One afternoon we motor ashore in the Zodiacs for a bush walk, following a mouse trapline along the narrow flat area along the coast. The path is so mossy it’s like walking on neon sheep fleece. Scarlet ra¯ta¯ flowers glow in the moments of bright sunshine between the squalls, waterfalls pour over the granite, and small flocks of raucous ka¯ka¯ follow us bossily through the bush.
Before our guide Lindsay Wilson joined Heritage, he spent a decade working for the Department of Conservation (DOC) in Fiordland, leading a team of biodiversity rangers. Secretary Island, he says, is the only large island in New Zealand where deer have been successfully eradicated. Five years on, we can see the evidence in the bush: the undergrowth is vibrant with fresh young shoots and seedlings.
‘‘We’re starting to get the beginnings of a multi-tiered forest again,‘‘ Wilson says. ‘‘It’s going to provide a whole lot more diversity of food for the birds.’’ Rare invertebrates thrive here, too. For about the last ten years, Secretary Island has also been the site of an arms race between the DOC trapping team and a wily adversary: kea. The rangers set out stoat traps with a mesh entrance and nails holding the lids shut. The kea rolled them over and over, hoping to dislodge the egg bait and peck at it through the mesh. They poked twigs inside or chucked small stones onto the mechanism just so they could watch it go BANG. Then they figured out how to pull the nails out with their beaks, rip open the mesh, and steal the bait. Some were killed when the traps snapped shut. The rangers replaced the nails with screws and used a heavier duty mesh. The kea unscrewed the screws and ripped open the mesh anyway.
When the rangers used bigger screws, the kea scraped at the wood around them until they could wriggle them free. At last, the rangers used metal grill instead of mesh, a large screw surrounded by a metal plate, and pegged each trap to the ground: finally a kea-proof rat-trap. At dusk that night we leave the relatively calm waters of Doubtful Sound and follow the setting sun back into the Tasman Sea. At 10pm, I retreat to my bunk as the ship pitches and rolls on the heaving swells, heading southward into the night. At these latitudes, just a month from the longest day, there is still a shade of light in the sky.
The second book in my suitcase is Tamatea Dusky, by Peta Carey, published in October 2020. Its beautiful pictures and prose tell many stories of Dusky Sound, including the lengthy visit, in 1773, by Captain James Cook and his crew on the ship Resolution. Just around the corner from where I am now, in what they named Pickersgill Harbour, they set up camp for six autumn weeks.
Ma¯ori, of course, had explored, hunted, fished and made their homes in these coves for centuries, and continued to do so after Cook left. But the Resolution’s visit, as Carey notes, ‘‘made its own indelible mark on the ecology of Dusky Sound’’ – and on history, too. Cook had seen the sound’s entrance on his first New Zealand voyage in 1770, from the deck of the Endeavour. It was late afternoon – too late to find a safe anchorage – so he reluctantly sailed past, naming it ‘Duskey’ Bay.
Three years on, the Resolution had just spent 117 freezing days in the Subantarctic. Cook, remembering the potential haven he’d seen, navigated the ship straight for Dusky Sound. The crew were ‘‘mesmerised’’, Carey writes. ‘‘They ate like kings (fish, crayfish, seal steak, countless birds) … mended sails, enjoyed a cup of tea-tree tea (ma¯nuka) and even managed to brew a not-half-bad beer from ‘spruce’ or rimu.’’ (Meanwhile, rats ran along the gangway and into the bush.)
The crew cleared trees from a headland so the ship’s astronomer could observe the heavens (you can still see the stumps) and the naturalists on board, father and son Johann and Georg Forster, busied themselves collecting specimens and making botanical and zoological sketches. The first New Zealand bird to be given a binomial scientific name – Procellaria vittata – was a broadbilled prion they collected on Anchor Island.
That’s where we go, on the final morning of our trip. Because Anchor Island is home to around half the world’s population of ka¯ka¯po¯, visiting is restricted, so we’re divided into groups and take turns. On the Zodiac, our group motors into Luncheon Cove – named by Cook after a day, he and his crew had a good feed of crayfish there. (We did, too, back in Doubtful Sound – the ship’s chef popped over to a nearby cray boat and bartered a few litres of booze for a couple of dozen crays.)
Today, playful fur seals are rolling in the clear green waters, making all kinds of strange grunts and whistles as guide Chris Todd shares the story of this historic place. ‘‘For Pa¯keha¯ New Zealand this is ground zero,’’ he says, once we’re all ashore and standing on the mossy ground at the head of the cove.
The first European house in Aotearoa was built right here, as well as the first European ship – just in the water there where the seal is lolling. The 40-foot Providence was begun by a sealing gang in 1793 (they killed 4500 fur seals in a year) and finished in 1796 by a group of shipwrecked mariners, including 41 stowaways.
There’s more detail about that dramatic tale in Carey’s book – including the possibility that the first Pa¯keha was born here on Anchor Island, too. One of the two women stowaways, Elizabeth Heatherley, had a baby daughter by the time she arrived in Norfolk Island, on the way back to Sydney. But the historical record is silent on whether she was born in Dusky Sound, because our only informants are male diarists, for whom, as Carey writes, ‘‘childbirth… is obviously of such insignificance that no-one bothered to mention it’’.
We don’t see any ka¯ka¯po¯ – unsurprising, as they’re both nocturnal and masters of disguise – but they’re doing well. Anchor added 37 chicks to the ka¯ka¯po¯ population in 2019. Deer were eradicated in 2007, and the forest is layered, lush, and thrumming with bellbirds and ka¯ka¯.
We return to the ship via the Many Islands. There are tawaki – Fiordland crested penguins – bobbing along in the open water beside us, and seals warming themselves on the rocks and islets. We even see several adorable newborn seal pups, dark and watchful at their mothers’ sides. I’m thankful the days of clubbing and killing are gone.
On the final night we steam out of Dusky Sound at dusk. Islands beyond islands, ridgeline after ridgeline, shades of blue and grey and smoke. It’s the same view Ma¯ori would have seen whenever they first discovered Tamatea, the same view Cook had in 1770 and 1773. So much has happened here, and much has changed, but it’s a largely invisible history, cloaked beneath the seemingly endless forests of Fiordland.
‘‘Whale!’’ someone shouts, and there it is, a long dark shape with a hooked fin curving out of the water right in front of the ship – possibly a fin whale, the second-largest animal in the world after the blue whale. Then an almost-full moon rises above the clouds, and the sun sets in a strange blaze of fluorescent orange.
That night I get talking to Bryan MacLeod, a Coromandel GP and the ship’s doctor. Most Heritage Expeditions trips are international affairs, he says. North American birders, Europeans, maybe one or two New Zealanders. For the first time ever, this was an all-local trip. That means all 50 of us will bring the stories of these special parts of our country home with us. We’ll begin to advocate for these places in our own communities, MacLeod says. The stories – and hopefully the species – won’t be lost.
Kate Evans is a freelance journalist based in Raglan, and travelled as a guest of Heritage Expeditions. Several more trips following the same route are scheduled for this summer, starting at $4495. Tamatea
by Peta Carey, is published by Potton & Burton.
‘‘They ate like kings (fish, crayfish, seal steak, countless birds) … mended sails, enjoyed a cup of tea-tree tea (ma¯nuka) and even managed to brew a not-half-bad beer from ‘spruce’ or rimu.’’ Peta Carey