Rat Island (3 page)

The Lapita and their Polynesian descendants habitually stocked their canoes with supplies, not only for the long haul across the water but also for the extended stay once they arrived. They brought their taro and yams for planting and their stone adzes and fire skills for clearing and burning the fields. They also brought animal food, in the form of the domestic chicken, pig, and dog. And most religiously of all, the Pacific voyagers packed their rat.

Rattus exulans
, the Pacific rat, was a constant companion of the seafaring clans. On almost every one of the islands that bore any sign of Polynesians, there were signs of their rat. The rat often traveled with a purpose, as a snack for the long overseas trips and as a self-perpetuating crop of protein to be planted and harvested in the new homeland. For the twentieth-century archaeologist digging up Oceania's past, the bones of
Rattus exulans
became a marker of human habitation as sure as the shards of Polynesian pottery. A sleek little mammal from Southeast Asia—with the climbing skills of a squirrel, but with no wings or fins—the Pacific rat had a presence across thousands of miles of the world's largest ocean that could only be explained by human transport. And in time the rat would be recognized as a force of nature to nearly rival its keepers.

N
O
M
OA

It wasn't until the thirteenth century—long after the settlement of Hawaii, of Easter Island, of nearly every speck of habitable land across the breadth of the South Pacific—that the little clan of Polynesians and the rat they called
kiore
finally set sail on that long journey southward, tacking into the trade winds, to the last great unexplored landmass of the Pacific.

The colonists of Aotearoa had landed well. For the
kiore
, there were fruits and nuts for hoarding, edible insects the size of mice, lizards and little birds with undefended eggs and nestlings. For the
kiore
's people, the M
ā
ori, there were beaches where they could comb for mussels and crabs, club a cornered seal, or scavenge a beached whale. There were waters in which to dive for conchs, spear and hook fish, harpoon a dolphin. Seabirds by the millions nested on the cliffs and headlands, to be plucked like berries. Inland lay great forests, with rich soils for growing crops, but also, as they were soon to discover, two-legged monsters.

In their three-thousand-year tour of the Pacific islands, the Aotearoans' ancestors had walked among giant geese and rails that reached to the waist. But there had been nothing to approach the enormity of the creature now standing before the new settlers. This thing walked on massive clawed feet affixed to two bony legs the thickness of rowing paddles. Its rotund body was covered in a shaggy cloak of plumes, narrowing to a long serpentine neck and a blunt and sturdy beak. From head to toe, the beast towered as tall as any two of the clansmen. It is not recorded which of the strangers fled upon the first encounter, but very soon thereafter—as the fossil record would abundantly reveal—one definitely became the pursuer.

The giant moa, as the first people of Aotearoa came to learn, made for epic feasting. A guild of moa hunters rose to the task, learning to avoid those treacherous feet and to spear and tackle and subdue these walking bonanzas of bird meat.

The moas were of a family of some fourteen long-distant cousins to the ostrich, some dwarfing their African counterpart, some as small as a bantam hen. All were flightless, and all were rabidly assailed. The moas' eggs, laid on nests of naked ground, became giant omelets, their shells drinking cups. Bones piled high in the middens of the moa hunters. One butchering site, excavated five hundred years after the hunting had ended, contained the remains of 678 moa. The bone gardens were so thick in places that industrial-age entrepreneurs came to mine and market the refuse as fertilizer. Within perhaps a century of the moas' meeting with the first people of Aotearoa, no moas remained.

The moas of Aotearoa were to become the symbolic victims in a country of evolutionary oddities on the verge of plunder. The landmass had been born in the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwanaland some 130 million years before the human form had been conceived, coming unstitched from Antarctica and Australia and drifting away on its own course. In its early departure Aotearoa had left behind those creatures that would one day be mammals and had set sail as a country stocked with primitive insects and spiders, dinosaurs, reptiles, and birds.

And from the threadbare cast of animal designs, the eons of isolation and evolution built a bizarre menagerie. With the demise of the dinosaurs, their descendants took over. While the rest of the world underwent a mammalian revolution—a flowering of furred creatures from mice to mammoths—the mammalian niches of Aotearoa blossomed with birds.

Aotearoa was the evolutionary crucible that produced the modern kiwi, a wingless bird wearing its nostrils on the far end of a dipstick bill, for probing little creatures deep in the forest duff. About the size of a domestic chicken, the kiwi lays an egg six times the size of a chicken's egg—a quarter of the mass of its mother. Unlike flying birds, whose bones are hollow for lightness, the hefty kiwi has bones filled with marrow, like those of a mammal.

With the development of the moas, the biggest of them standing nearly twelve feet tall and weighing a quarter ton, Aotearoa had itself the ecological counterparts of the horse and the camel. No tigers or wolves existed to hunt them, but there were equivalents patrolling the skies, most spectacularly in the form of an enormous eagle,
Harpagornismoorei
, with a ten-foot wingspan and meat-hook talons that probably gave young moas their best reason for running.

Vying for the title of the oddest of the lot was the kakapo, Aotearoa's answer to the possum. The kakapo was, at its ancestral core, a parrot, beyond which comparisons became vague. It grew big and chunky, up to nine pounds heavy and two feet high, more closely resembling an owl. It was the heftiest parrot ever, a feat made possible in its abandonment of flight. The kakapo scuttled about in the understory of the brushlands, hobbitlike, foraging for fruits and nuts and leafy greens. It sometimes climbed and clambered about the trees. Its only ingrained fears came from the skies in the form of raptors, which it escaped by hunkering down and hiding by day.

The grounded existence and cryptic defense that had served the kakapo for so long would soon render it easy meat in Aotearoa's new era of terrestrial predators. As moas went scarce, and as the country's swans, geese, giant rail, and goshawks disappeared too, the moa hunters turned their sights and their dogs on the kakapo. The M
ā
ori's
kuri
, a wiry little dog that had accompanied the Lapita seafarers from their ancestral ports off New Guinea, would sniff out birds hiding in the thickets. If a kakapo lay hunkered in its burrow, a barbed stick would snag and drag the growling bird to the hands that would wring its neck.

The kakapo's flesh was a delicacy. Its soft green feathers, when woven, became the fabric of the cloaks and capes of chiefs. On feast days, partygoers wore earrings strung with the heads of kakapos.

What the hunters and their dogs and their fires didn't manage to obliterate of Aotearoa's wildlife, the
kiore
often did. When the beech or rimu trees produced a particularly good crop of seeds and nuts, the
kiore
periodically irrupted in plagues and scoured the forests top to bottom.
Kiore
ate the forest fruits that fed Aotearoa's animal kingdom. They ate the animals too. They feasted on Aotearoa's giant flightless beetles, on the eggs of Aotearoa's nocturnal lizards, gnawed through the shells of the island's giant land snails. They ate the eggs and hatchlings of Aotearoa's tuatara, Earth's sole remaining member of a lizardlike clan of reptiles that had walked with dinosaurs two hundred million years before.
Kiore
ate Aotearoa's giant weta, a cricket the size of a mouse. They ate the eggs and chicks of colonial seabirds. Six species of little songbirds disappeared with the
kiore
's arrival.
Kiore
, it would later be suggested, as an eater of eggs and a competitor for forage, may have even helped slay the giant moa.

Kiore
spread in advance of their hosts, multiplying exponentially, swarming over the virgin Aotearoan candyland—“a grey tide,” wrote the paleontologist Richard Holdaway, “turning everything edible into rat protein as it went.”

Survivors of Aotearoa's invasion retreated to tenuous safety offshore. The myriad coastal islands of the island nation became the last refuge for the New Zealand snipe, for the sitting duck called the Auckland merganser, and for the dinosaurian throwback the tuatara. But even the farthest sanctuaries would soon be too near.

S
TRANGERS
B
EARING
G
IFTS

In 1642 a Dutch sailing fleet commanded by Abel Tasman sighted the Aotearoan homeland, “a large land, uplifted high.” Tasman's men were likely looking upon the frosted peaks of the coastal range now called Fiordland, on the southern island of what his cartographers would later name New Zealand. A canoe loaded with islanders came out to meet Tasman and, not trusting the looks or intentions of the strangers, rammed one of his vessels and killed four of his crew. Tasman's men returned the greeting, killing several of the islanders. Welcome to Aotearoa. Without stepping ashore, Tasman beat a hasty retreat, away from the newly christened Murderer's Bay, and sailed north for what he hoped would be warmer receptions in Fiji.

A century later the outside world came knocking again, this time sticking around for keeps. In 1769, HMS
Endeavour
, commanded by James Cook, made its way from Great Britain across the Atlantic, around South America's Cape Horn, and west into the Polynesian universe of the South Pacific. On October 6, with the help of a Tahitian guide, Cook and the crew of the
Endeavour
reached the land of New Zealand and began charting its shores and meeting its residents, the M
ā
ori.

To Cook, the M
ā
ori were a paradoxical people with a gift for elegant gardens and a fearsome reputation for eating their enemies. Cook traded cloth, beads, and nails for the M
ā
ori's fish, sweet potatoes, and dog-skin cloaks. Occasionally the two traded aggressions, canoe-loads of M
ā
ori singing heartily of killing Cook and crew, Cook and crew returning the compliments with guns and cannons.

Cook would eventually make three Pacific voyages, stopping each time in New Zealand and leaving more than trinkets and the occasional skirmish behind. His boats came increasingly loaded with animals from home. “Floating menageries” of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, rabbits, chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, peafowl, dogs, cats, cockroaches, and rats toured the Pacific, as guests of Captain Cook. The barnyard passengers were regularly unloaded as gifts to the islanders. The ships' stowaway vermin helped themselves ashore. Cook's mooring lines provided his ships' rats with the equivalent of gangplanks, spilling them ashore like convoys of cruise-ship tourists.

The rats of Cook's ships were an animal apart from the M
ā
ori's
kiore
. They were
Rattus norvegicus
, brown rats originally misnamed Norway rats, natives of northeast China that had mastered a rewarding vocation raiding the grain bins and garbage heaps of Western civilization, and stealing rides on its sailing ships around the world. “They stood in their holes peering at you like grandfathers in a doorway,” wrote a young adventurer named Herman Melville from aboard one of the whaling ships that would one day inspire
Moby-Dick
. “Every chink and cranny swarmed with them; they did not live among you, but you among them.”

Once ashore, ferried either aboard cargo or by the paddling of their own little feet, the brown rats immediately made themselves at home. Not quite as able climbers as the
kiore
, they made a better living on the ground. They combed the beaches for shellfish and sand fleas and stranded marine life. They prowled the seabird colonies that had come to such shores as New Zealand's to avoid their type. The brown rats swept inland, pushing the smaller
kiore
aside, making meat of forest birds so conveniently nesting on the ground. They spread through the mountains and forests.

By the 1870s the plague of rats had become a common entry in the journals of New Zealand's colonial naturalists. “This cosmopolitan pest swarms through every part of the country, and nothing escapes its voracity,” wrote the ornithologist Walter Buller. “It is very abundant in all our woods, and the wonder rather is that any of our insessorial birds are able to bear their broods in safety. Species that nest in hollow trees, or in other situations accessible to the ravages of this little thief, are found to be decreasing, while other species whose nests are, as a rule, more favorably placed, continue to exist in undiminished numbers.”

“These rats are the great enemies of birds, and any bird living or breeding near the ground has but a small chance of existing,” wrote the ironic Andreas Reischek, a noted collector and plunderer of New Zealand's scarcest avifauna. “They play havoc alike with eggs and young, and even attack the parent birds … It took five months of shooting, poisoning and trapping before they showed signs of decreasing around camp.”

By the latter half of the nineteenth century, what was left of the New Zealand fauna had been invaded by a third species of rat.
Rattus rattus
, the black rat, had made its way from its homeland in Southeast Asia with the sailors and whalers of the southern seas. More lithe and athletic than the brown rat, and a better climber of trees than the
kiore
, the black rat was the most versatile killer of the trio.