New Zealand

About New Zealand

New Zealand separated from other land long before mammals reached it, and until people arrived it had no land mammals at all apart from bats. Birds took every available role — grazing, browsing, predation, scavenging — and many lost the ability to fly because there was nothing to fly from. The tuatara, the only survivor of an otherwise extinct reptile order, persists here and nowhere else. That entire arrangement was catastrophically vulnerable to introduced rats, stoats, possums and cats, and the extinctions that followed human settlement were rapid and extensive. New Zealand's response has been the most ambitious island-scale predator eradication programme in the world, clearing offshore islands and fenced mainland sanctuaries entirely and using them as refuges to rebuild populations.