New Zealand's flight path to disaster
"Few people are aware that, as the authors claim, New Zealand has a better record of the birds that lived over the past 100,000 years than any other area of the world. Our avifauna is diverse, unique, special, intriguing - and, to a large extent, extinct"
New Zealand Herald
14 January 2003

Stephens Island covers an area of 2.6 sq km (1 sq mile), and is the most distant island off the northern tip of the South Island adjoining the Marlborough Sounds. The Stephens Island wren, which was at one time on the mainland, was together with two of its previously extinct relatives, the only known flightless songbird in the world.  The wren functioned ecologically as an avian mouse.

The fate of Xenicus lyalli is a classic but pathetic tale of New Zealand natural history. At a meeting of the Ornithologists' Club in London in 1894, a well-known collector the Hon W Rothschild, announced his possession of ten specimens of a rare bird which he had obtained from Henry Travers in Wellington, who got them from the lighthouse keeper on Stephens Island. The remarkable find had actually been accomplished by the lighthouse keeper's cat.

One specimen was also given to the New Zealand ornithological authority Sir Walter Buller, and a debate over who first named the bird occurred in Buller's favor.  The cat meanwhile, continued its duties, but it is not known how many specimens it eventually collected.  Buller explained another five specimens, so Travers handled at least 16 wrens.  It never occurred to anyone that it would be prudent to find out how many wrens were on the island.

Specimen collecting in 1894 is a stark contrast with conservation of today, that has brought back the Chatham Island black robin and the kakapo from the absolute brink of extinction.  The only consolation of the astute hunting of the cat is that it must have been well fed by the lighthouse keeper, to collect birds intact for the world to see the only flightless, and smallest songbird.

Dr Richard Holdaway wrote in New Zealand Geographic in 1996 "... the surveyors and workmen who stepped ashore on Stephens Island in the 1890s to build the light station stepped back in time.  The tiny island held the last fragment of "mainland" New Zealand as it was before humans arrived in the archipelago.  Not even the Pacific rat, the kiore, introduced by Maori, had reached the island.  Small as it was, the island's forested summit held a diversity of vertebrates and invertebrates that even then was unique.

The wren population on Stephens Island was, in fact, the last remnant of a species that once lived throughout New Zealand.  It was the third of the six known species of New Zealand wrens to become extinct.  Thought to be the only flightless songbird in the world to be seen by Europeans, the Stephens Island wren was swept from the mainland by the Pacific rats that exterminated its two flightless relatives - the thick-thighed and long billed wrens - hundreds of years before ..."

The bush wren was the fourth New Zealand wren extinction.  The last recorded sighting of the North Island subspecies Xenicus longipes stokesi was in the Te Urewera Range in 1955.  The South Island subspecies Xenicus longipes longipes was last sighted in Nelson Lakes National Park in 1968 and Kaimohu Island off Stewart Island in 1972.  Both of these subspecies are also known as the New Zealand bush wren.