Where the Wild Things Were by William Stolzenburg

Henry spent the next 10 years gathering up as many kakapos as he could find - over 500 - and releasing them on the island. He was tasked with establishing a refuge for the birds on an island off the southwest corner of New Zealand, known as Resolution Island.

The New Zealand government made its first efforts at saving the bird in the 1890s, when it appointed a hunter and self-taught naturalist by the name of Richard Henry to be the birds' caretaker. Kakapo numbers quickly shrank so that, once New Zealand's third most populous bird, they soon only lived in small enclaves scattered around the country. But the stoats quickly found much easier prey than rabbits - kakapos. So to deal with the rabbit problem, settlers introduced stoats - a member of the weasel clan and a terrific predator. With their huge numbers and voracious appetites, they began eating the sheep's rangeland. Sheep ate much of the vegetation, and the rabbits, being rabbits, exploded in population. Stolzenburg explains that in the 1800s, settlers arriving in New Zealand brought sheep and rabbits with them for game.

'Of course, when the invaders got to New Zealand - when the rats and the cats and the weasels came to New Zealand - this was a bird that was just set up for massacre, and that's exactly what happened.' 'It exuded this particular scent also that was supposed to attract other kakapos,' he says. Stolzenburg tells NPR's Renee Montagne that because its only predators were in the sky, the kakapo had no need to fly and, therefore, couldn't. One species Stolzenburg focuses on is the kakapo, a large, green, nocturnal parrot that is found only in New Zealand.

Where the Wild Things Were by William Stolzenburg