Hello and Happy Saturday. This week's episode on Marjorie Courtney Latimer and the selacanth kept making me think about one of our previous episodes, and that was the one on the extinction of the Stephens Island wren. These are really very different stories, but they both have islands and extinct animal species and specimen collection and the impact of outdoor cats on an ecosystem. So it is today's Saturday classic. This episode originally came out on June fourteenth, twenty seventeen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Hey, Tracy, have you ever heard of a cat named Tibbles who was single handedly responsible? Powedly? You'll sometimes see it written out for wiping out an entire species of bird yep, because of a lighthouse keeper. Yeah. It shows up on various listicles from time to time along the lines You'll see like ex animals who changed History. It's one of the most famous extinction stories, and because it has this quaint, though sad aspect to it, it has really taken on a life of its own, and it's one that gets repeated a lot, but the real story is actually a lot more complex than simply saying one cat killed all the birds. So today we're going to take a look at the original tale as it's usually told, and then we'll delve into the reality of the demise of the bird species involved. Because the bird did legitimately go extinct, that part is true, and it also becomes an interesting story of conservation and the importance of protecting both flora and fauna unique to specific and isolated locations. And there's even a little bit of scientific community intrigue and offense in the mix. So it's got everything for a good story. Also, because this does involve extinction and then lay ways to try to combat similar problems, there's that's pretty much a whole episode where we talk about animals being killed. So if that is something particularly sensitive to you, this might not be your episode. I will say this, I am usually particularly sensitive to it. It does not bother me in this context, So I don't know if that's your guidepost or not, but there you go. Well, and having had an outdoor cat from like nineteen eighty until approximately nineteen ninety six a long time. But anyway, I grew up with an outdoor cat because we lived out in the country and that was what you did. Yeah, you've become accustomed to cats bringing you thing. Yeah, cats bringing us small animals was something that happened all time. So yeah, yeah, we had that growing up, and it is one of the reasons my small herd never goes outside. Yeah. Yeah, my cats. Once I was an adult and caring for my own cats were strictly indoor, although a couple of them did escape on at least one occasion. Yeah. Yeah. But today we're going to talk about the Stephen's Island wren and this cat and what did and did not happen. The particular wren in this story was a tiny bird. It could fit in the palm of a human hand, and it was found on Stephen's Island, which is a New Zealand. It's likely that these wrens, known as Zencus traversia leali in Latin and sometimes called lyle wrens, were possibly part of the fauna of ancient Gondwana land. They were related to the Kiwi. Fossil evidence suggests that these tiny birds are ones that are incredibly closely related to them, once lived throughout New Zealand, and it's believed that the introduction of predatory species such as rats eliminated them from all the other areas of the country but Stephen's Island, which was isolated by the eighteen nineties. The birds were dark olive brown in color, with yellowish coloring at the throat and the breast. Skeletal evidence, as well as witness accounts, indicate that the wren was flightless. It spent its time on the ground hunting for insects to eat, and that makes it one of only three known flightless songbirds in the world. The wrens nested in small, out of the way spots, such as holes and recesses under rocks, and it was also believed to have been nocturnal. Yeah, I read one account that said that it weighed about the same as a quarter, but I didn't find anything that backed that up. But even so, it's a very tiny, light little thing, and sometimes you'll see it. When people described it, they talked about it being almost more like a mouse than a bird in some ways, probably because it scurried along the ground. The island itself is also known by its Maori name take pourdois and it is a small place. It is less than a square mile. That's another one of those things that gets reported very differently. Some we'll say it's only half a square mile, some even less than that. But we know that it's less than a square mile about one point five square kilometers estimate. And it sits about two miles off of New Zealand's South Island's northern shore, at the northern edge of the Marlborough Sounds. And the weather on the island is mild in temperatures, but there is frequent rain and often high winds. It was renamed Stephens Island after Philip Stephens, the late eighteenth century first Secretary to the Admiralty of the United Kingdom. Prior to the eighteen seventies, it hadn't been explored by any Anglo parties. It's unknown if any Maori people's visited it prior to that, but it was a pristine place in terms of its ecological condition when maritime officials from New Zealand first visited it, and because the island sits on a shipping route and there had been several shipwrecks nearby in the middle of the century, it was outfitted with an oiled powered lighthouse in eighteen ninety four. That lighthouse stood at the highest elevation point above sea level of any lighthouse in New Zealand at the time. It was also more power full than any others in New Zealand at that time, and it cost more than nine thousand pounds to build. Before the lighthouse was installed to illuminate the Cooks Strait's western approaches, Stephens Island was almost entirely untouched. There were no non native species that had been introduced. The flora was just a natural and unchecked and undeveloped. Well into the eighteen hundreds, the tiny island was pretty densely forested. When workers first arrived in eighteen ninety two to start construction on the lighthouse, birds were abundant. The journals of one of the men, Fw Ingram, are quoted in a two thousand and four paper about the extinction of the wren. That paper was written by Ross Galbreeze and Derek Brown, and according to Ingram's account, there were two kinds of wren saddlebacks, native thrush and native crows on the island when the work began. There After, the lighthouse and a small farm were established. An estimated ninety percent of the island's native forest was to destroyed due to grazing and fire. A patchy low forest eventually established and remains in the place of the thick forest that had been destroyed, and shrubs, grasses, and vine lens persisted also. So with this new fancy lighthouse, the island needed a lighthouse keeper. So we are getting now into the story as it's usually told. So in eighteen ninety four, David Lyle moved to Stephen's Island to fill that position, and the island was not easy to get to. Travelers had to cross Cook straight by boat and then board a basket that was attached to the station's crane, and after that there was an uphill walk of about one hundred and eighty meters or one hundred and ninety six yards to the lighthouse itself. This was a pretty extreme solitary type position that you would accept. Lyle, his wife and a son also brought along a cat named Tibbles when they moved to Stephen's Island. The idea was that Tibbles would keep the mice at bay and also be a companion for this lonely outpost. They were not the island's only residents actually, but we'll come back to that. Of course, a good mouser such as Tibbles would also probably be interested in going after small nocturnal birds as well, especially since, as Holly said earlier, they've been described as mouse like. But that was never the intention. They did not on purpose bring a cat to kill birds. No, and usually when you hear this story told, they really only talk about David Lyle and Tibbles, and any family is kind of left out. But so not long after David and Tibbles and his family arrived on the island, the cat started bringing fresh kills to her human Lyle was interested in nature, and he was an amateur ornithologist, and he had never seen a bird quite like the ones that Tibbles was killing. So he examined them and he skinned them as he did to you know, more fully take account of what their body was like and what these birds were. When a shit brought supplies to the island on its regular bimonthly schedule, Lyle sent one of his rin skins back on it, intending for it to reach a well known ornithologist, Sir Walter Buller, it's believed that he did receive this skin sometime in July eighteen ninety four. Later on, Beller would write quote, there is probably nothing so refreshing to the soul of a naturalist as the discovery of a new species. You will readily understand. Therefore, how pleased I was at receiving the skin of a bird from stephen Island, which was entirely distinct from anything hitherto known. Eventually, Lyle collected ten samples. That number is going to shift around when we get to the reality, but for the purposes of this story, ten samples from Tibble's offering, and they were in good condition because the cat seemed to be more interested in killing the birds than she wasn't eating them. Feline behaviorists might also suggest that she was bringing them to Lyle as a means of offering him provisions showing she could take care of him as well as herself. There are also theories that cats do that to try to teach us stupid humans how to find our own food. But in any case, she was not eating them, so they were in quite good condition. After he had been examining these various specimens, Buller realized that the birds Lyle had been collecting from Tibbles were a previously unidentified species of wren, so one of these Buller sent to London to the British Ornithologists Union so it could be illustrated, and he also was preparing his research and findings so that he could publish his discovery of the Stephens Island wren in the journal Ibis. It was believed that there had likely been ten mating pairs of the wren on Stephen's Island before Tibbles the cat got there. This is not a large number of birds, to be sure, so it would not really take very long for an enterprising cat with decent hunting skills to severely damage those numbers. In eighteen ninety five, just a year after Lyle and his cat had arrived on the island, the christ Church Press commented on Tibbles's work, quote, there is very good reason to believe that the bird is no longer to be found on this island, as it is not known to exist anywhere else. It has apparently become quite extinct. This is probably a record performance in the way of extermination, and according to legend, Tibbles wiped out the Stephens Island wren almost as soon as it was recognized as a newly discovered species. So that's the story that you usually get told in a quickie articles yep, or in like a one sentence throwaway line in the context of something completely different. It will be like and there was even an entire species of bird killed by the light keeper's cat. Yeah, but there is a lot more to this story. And before we dive into that bigger, more detailed version of what happened to the Stephens Island wren, we're gonna pause and have a word from one of our sponsors. While the story of Tibble's and the Stephens Island wren is a cautionary tale about the day of invasive species, and that is a very legitimate concern, the very simplified version that is normally shared leaves out some more complex and nuanced elements to the decline of one species due to the import of another, as well as the involvement of many more players in the narrative, as we are definitely not now playing the threat of invasive species, but that there's a bigger story going on here. During the construction period for the lighthouse, an anonymous collector had visited the island to gather specimens. Gal Breath and Brown put forth the theory in their paper that the collector, which was a pseudonym used by that person in question when publishing in the Wellington Evening Post, was in fact none other than the local natural history dealer, which was a man named Henry H. Travers, and before Lyle and Tibble's even set foot on the island, Sir Walter Buller was aware of a number of birds to be found there, most likely due to the accounts that the collector had published in the paper or through contact with Travers himself. Of note, however, no wren was actually mentioned in the writings of the collector. I also just love that he wrote as the collector, because of course there's the whole Guardians of the Galaxy comedy tian that we could do. But he had not mentioned the ren at all in any of these writings, and there were no mentions of a wren in the comments of Buller at a January eighteen ninety three meeting of the Wellington Philosophical Society, where he discussed some of the unique birds that could be found on Stephen's Island. Buller also suggested at that meeting that two other New Zealand islands, Resolution Island and Little Barrier Island, could be used as preservation grounds for some of the bird species that were experiencing population decline on the mainland, but it appears that no similar consideration was given to Stephens Island. Regarding David Lyle and Tibbles, we mentioned a few moments ago so that they were not the only ones who had moved onto the island. In fact, there were three lighthouse keepers in their families, as well as a teacher to see to the children's education seventeen people in all at the start of eighteen ninety four, when the lighthouse became operational. While Lyle was sending his samples to Buller, at some point Henry Travers also became aware of the unique items being relayed by Lyle through an intermediary aboard the supply ship. Travers and Buller were not unknown to each other. As a dealer in natural items. Travers had none business with Buller on a number of occasions, and Travers s felt as though such rare and unique specimens could be sold for more than Buller was able to pay. He convinced Lyle to sell him some of the wren's skins. Yeah, so, in addition to whatever activities are happening, we are now seeing an uptick in human interest in these birds. And this is where yet another man enters the picture, the honorable Walter Rothschild, who had dealt with both Travers and Buller as specimen dealers prior to this new discovery of the Stevens Island wren, and as a wealthy Englishman, Rothschild had both the means to pay handsomely for rare specimens and the connections to publish information about them before Buller could. There actually was some realization among the British Ornithologists involved in publishing the IBIS and the British Ornithologists Club Proceedings periodical to which Rothschild to which Rothschild's research had been presented, that there were two men describing the same find but both went to press yes. So for clarity, at this point, Travers has started selling to a very rich person in London, Rothschild. At the same time Buller is also purchasing these samples and they are writing up about this newly discovered species, and they both presented to both the IBIS and the British Ornithologists Club's proceedings, just their little period their notes on their meetings, and that's a small enough group that there were a lot of crossover people going, hey, we don't we have a thing from that guy Buller about this? Didn't that ring ye before? Yeah, but we're going forward with this too. So they both published, and it was a little bit of a gentleman's drama. So Roth's child named the wrend Traversia leali in the proceedings that was published in December of eighteen ninety four. When Buller's paper came out in April of eighteen ninety five, the bird was called Xenicus in Solaris. And this entire chain of events caused massive friction between the two men, each declaring that the other had not been a gentleman. You may recall from the beginning when we talked about the bird that it is called Xenicus and then sometimes traversia in parentheses leali. So in the end there was sort of a a combining of the two in the scientific community. This is like a much smaller in every sense of the word, version of the bone Wars. Yes, But even before four Buller's paper, which was printed by ibis that editorial from the christ Church Press we mentioned earlier that declared the wren likely extinct had already come out. So there was already an article saying the bird was probably extinct before the scientific paper on it. Yeah, so there was the first printed stuff in December. In March that article came out in the christ Church Paper saying there are no more of these birds. And then in April Buller's paper was published saying I have discovered a new kind of bird. It's a very complex and tightly packed timeline in terms of like discovery and when this bird was thought to have ended. So in March of eighteen ninety five, Traverse wrote to Rothschild a letter that suggested that he was hunting wren's himself to send to London. Quote. I have recently returned from a special trip to Stephen's Island, where I went to have a good hunt for more specimens of Traversia Lealey, but unfortunately without success. I hunted the island over and round, and as I had three men with me who formed my boat crew and some of the residents of the island, you can imagine we made a thorough search. I did not get any specimens of the bird. I went specifically four, although mister Lyle's boy gave me a specimen that had been found just alive by the owner of the cat that had caught the others, and this his father had put into spirit. So at that point cumans are also hunting the bird. That claim of extinction in early eighteen ninety five may have been premature. For one. Travers seems to have used the news of the extinction to charge higher prices for the preserved bird specimens that he offered to collectors after that, so he might have been perpetuating this claim of extinction for his own financial gain. Yeah, if you look at how his prices rated. That first one that he sent to Rothschild, I think he charged five pounds for and then he tried to charge thirty five pounds four and was eventually talked down to twelve if I'm remembering correctly. So he was definitely like, they're no more of this bird. It is a lot more expensive now. But both Travers and Buller each received additional specimens for several years after eighteen ninety five, so even after he denounced personal collecting of endangered species specimens, Buller continued to seek out the Stevens Island wren for himself, and when I say that, I mean in specimen form, not live Steven's Island wrens. He also made purchases for his son to have them, as well as at least one other ornithologist, and Buller for the Record maintained in his notes that all samples of the bird had come from David Lyle, and thus that would be from his cat. But that gets into some weird issues, as there are specimens in museums that are labeled as late as eighteen ninety nine, well after Lyle had actually moved on from the Stevens Island Lighthouse job. Additionally, there are completely mismatched accounts of just how many preserved wrens there are floating around. If you compare the records and letters of Travers and Buller, things do not match up at all. Travers was still selling Steven's Island wrens into the early nineteen hundreds, but it's unclear whether those were items that he had been hanging on to for several years or if they were new acquisitions. Additionally, even those records might not truly reflect the lots that Travers was selling at the time, so there's no way to verify even the existence of Travers stock of the extinct bird, let alone its condition relative to its age. Yeah, there's one story of a museum that discovered that they had a lot that someone had purchased from Travers, but it was largely destroyed. It had not been properly cared for, so they did not account for whether or not there was a wren in the mix. There there's a lot of not really fantastic record keeping, which leads to a lot of the nebulous aspects of this story. So the thing is, though, that collecting may have really had a significant hand in the ex distinction of the Stevens Island wren, But we don't actually know if Traver's ever managed to catch any the two times that he claimed he tried, the one that we read his writings about earlier, and there was one other time. He reported that he failed on both of those occasions, And there are additional factors too. Remember earlier when we mentioned that there were other people who moved to the island in addition to David Lyle and Tibbles, Apparently someone else in that group of people also brought at least one other cat, or possibly Tibbles was pregnant when she arrived, because within a few years there was a cat population on Stephen's Island, not just one cat. And it's also possible that the name Tibbles was just attached to the story later it wasn't even Lyle's cat in the first place, but just a cat that happened to be around. Yeah, it's like I said, it's been simplified in a really fun way to tell, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the reality. And we're going to talk more about the cats on Stephen's Island and what happened to all those bird bodies after we first take a little sponsor break. So right before we went to break, Tracy was saying that there was a cat population at some point on the island, and it's unclear when exactly it became more than one cat, or if it had always been more than one cat. There are mentions of other cats in notes and writings made by people about those early days of the Lighthouse community, but these are all anecdotal and they were written after the facts, so they're not especially reliable. As early as eighteen ninety five, though Lyle was writing notes to Buller about the available birds on the island, and he specifically references some of them being scarce due to cats plural. He also describes those cats as having become wild, so there was already the beginning of a feral population. Like a year after he had arrived ninety seven, the cat population was noted by a lighthouse keeper as being a quote large number. The report that description was included in also suggested that some means of destroying the cats had to be found. A few years later, in nineteen oh one, the native reptile population was also in danger and a bounty was established on the cats. Yeah, at that point they were kind of like, well, the birds are already gone, so we'll figure this out. And it got put off within and then they were like there was a very glorious reptile population on Steven's Island, and they were like, Okay, we can't let this happen again. Now we have to kill the cats, which sucks. This is reminding me of the webcomic camp We Don't Watch You. I don't know if you've ever read that, but it is a camp about children who have been sent by their parents to this camp because they are not wanted for whatever reason, and one of the early strips there is whatever one thinks is going to be a food drop, but it turns out to be a box full of feral cats. And every installment of the strip after that has a cat hidden somewhere. So in nineteen oh five, this was four years after the cat bounty was established, Sir Walter Buehler made a written suggestion that cats should no longer ever be allowed on the island or on any other isolated islands where native species could fall victim to their pre drive, and he also included the suggestion that if mice were a concern, for example, if people were going to take care of the lighthouse and they were worried about mice, that the state should provide, at state expense, mouse traps rather than allow feline rodent management in such places. Over the course of more than two decades, hundreds of cats were shot on Stephen's Island, and in nineteen twenty five the island was declared to be free of cats. So, even though it is not really entirely fair to blame Tibble's ending the Stevens Island, Wren the role of cats in shifting the balance of wildlife populations is one which has been debated for some time, and cats most assuredly were responsible for the majority of the deaths of those birds, and they were threatening other native wildlife on the island after those wrens were gone. According to a study published in Nature in twenty thirteen, free ranging domestic cats in the United States were estimated to kill one point three to four billion birds that's billion with a bee and six point three to twenty two point three billion also with a b mammals annually. For the purposes of that study, domestic cats included both cats that have a home that are allowed to roam and strays including ferrells, with homeless cats responsible for most of those kills. That same study also commented that quote free ranging cats on islands has caused or contributed to thirty three or fourteen percent of the modern bird, mammal and reptile extinctions recorded by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List. Humans are still trying to figure out how to manage cab populations in ways that are humane in order to curtail the unbalanced mortality in other species that can result from even well fed but still prey driven animals. While cats, as we discussed on an older episode, have become part of human culture both for their excellent pest hunting skills as well as their companionship, they are also very very good at multiplying at a really rapid rate, so efforts to find and execute a solution still continue. As an aside, it appears to have been Rothschild's account of the entire situation that first pinned the loss of the entire species on tibbles, and then that was repeated for simplicity for more than one hundred years. Yeah, and Rothschild this whole time, we should point out, was in London. It wasn't like he was on the sea. He wrote this after the fact and having never actually been to the place where this was taking place. And as for what happened to all of those deceased birds that were collected on the tiny island, there are fifteen wren specimens accounted for, and those have made their way into museum collections around the world. Of the samples Rothschild gathered, the Natural History Museum in London has three, The Museum of Natural History in New York has four. The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia has one, and the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts has one. The three that Buller had, one for himself and two for his son, are in the Canterbury Museum, christ Church, which has two, and the last is in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. There are also Stephens Island wren specimens at the Colonial Museum now the Museum of New Zealand Tipapa Tongarewa. I am probably mispronouncing that I could not find a good pronunciation example which is in Wellington and the Otago Museum in Dunedin, and that one actually lists two, but only one is clearly accounted for, so there's a little bit of fuzzy fuzziness there as well. The Stephens Island Lighthouse still exists. It was converted from oil to electric in the late nineteen thirties and then was automated in the late nineteen eighties. In nineteen eighty nine, the last lighthouse keeper left the island. It's not open to the public and the Maritime New Zealand's Wellington Office conducts operation and monitoring of the lighthouse remotely. Yeah, if you want to go to the island, you're probably a scientist because there are still multiple rare species on the island, particularly what has been described by scientists as a diverse reptile community. It is now in nature reserve. For example, a reptile called the Tuitata is of particular import on Stephen's Island as it is the only surviving species of its order. They are also the cutest things, in my opinion, if you see pictures of them, they just have very cute, little expressive faces. I saw some videos of one. Apparently there was a reintroduction effort yeah with them, and as I was looking for examples, I was like, I was looking for videos of New Zealanders saying all these words, and then I got down a rabbit hole of looking at lizard videos. They're really cute, and it really has become New Zealand is really making a massive effort at conservation, and in part of in part, this whole episode is the driver of some of those efforts. Like people realized, oh, if we are not thoughtful about how we handle particularly these small islands that are harboring things that cannot be found anywhere else and are small in number, we will then make sure those never exist on the earth again. And we don't want that. So there is a lot of care going into trying to preserve native species. Yeah, so that is the more complicated than just tibbles. The cat eate all the birds of how the Stephens Island RN went extinct. Yeah, although cats were responsible for a lot of it. I sounded a lot more chipper when I said yeah than the story actually warrants. Yeah. So only in museums now in their deceased forum unfortunately. Yes, thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hello and Happy Saturday. This week's episode on Marjorie Courtney Latimer and the selacanth kept making me think about one of our previous episodes, and that was the one on the extinction of the Stephens Island wren. These are really very different stories, but they both have islands and extinct animal species and specimen collection and the impact of outdoor cats on an ecosystem. So it is today's Saturday classic. This episode originally came out on June fourteenth, twenty seventeen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Hey, Tracy, have you ever heard of a cat named Tibbles who was single handedly responsible? Powedly? You'll sometimes see it written out for wiping out an entire species of bird yep, because of a lighthouse keeper. Yeah. It shows up on various listicles from time to time along the lines You'll see like ex animals who changed History. It's one of the most famous extinction stories, and because it has this quaint, though sad aspect to it, it has really taken on a life of its own, and it's one that gets repeated a lot, but the real story is actually a lot more complex than simply saying one cat killed all the birds. So today we're going to take a look at the original tale as it's usually told, and then we'll delve into the reality of the demise of the bird species involved. Because the bird did legitimately go extinct, that part is true, and it also becomes an interesting story of conservation and the importance of protecting both flora and fauna unique to specific and isolated locations. And there's even a little bit of scientific community intrigue and offense in the mix. So it's got everything for a good story. Also, because this does involve extinction and then lay ways to try to combat similar problems, there's that's pretty much a whole episode where we talk about animals being killed. So if that is something particularly sensitive to you, this might not be your episode. I will say this, I am usually particularly sensitive to it. It does not bother me in this context, So I don't know if that's your guidepost or not, but there you go. Well, and having had an outdoor cat from like nineteen eighty until approximately nineteen ninety six a long time. But anyway, I grew up with an outdoor cat because we lived out in the country and that was what you did. Yeah, you've become accustomed to cats bringing you thing. Yeah, cats bringing us small animals was something that happened all time. So yeah, yeah, we had that growing up, and it is one of the reasons my small herd never goes outside. Yeah. Yeah, my cats. Once I was an adult and caring for my own cats were strictly indoor, although a couple of them did escape on at least one occasion. Yeah. Yeah. But today we're going to talk about the Stephen's Island wren and this cat and what did and did not happen. The particular wren in this story was a tiny bird. It could fit in the palm of a human hand, and it was found on Stephen's Island, which is a New Zealand. It's likely that these wrens, known as Zencus traversia leali in Latin and sometimes called lyle wrens, were possibly part of the fauna of ancient Gondwana land. They were related to the Kiwi. Fossil evidence suggests that these tiny birds are ones that are incredibly closely related to them, once lived throughout New Zealand, and it's believed that the introduction of predatory species such as rats eliminated them from all the other areas of the country but Stephen's Island, which was isolated by the eighteen nineties. The birds were dark olive brown in color, with yellowish coloring at the throat and the breast. Skeletal evidence, as well as witness accounts, indicate that the wren was flightless. It spent its time on the ground hunting for insects to eat, and that makes it one of only three known flightless songbirds in the world. The wrens nested in small, out of the way spots, such as holes and recesses under rocks, and it was also believed to have been nocturnal. Yeah, I read one account that said that it weighed about the same as a quarter, but I didn't find anything that backed that up. But even so, it's a very tiny, light little thing, and sometimes you'll see it. When people described it, they talked about it being almost more like a mouse than a bird in some ways, probably because it scurried along the ground. The island itself is also known by its Maori name take pourdois and it is a small place. It is less than a square mile. That's another one of those things that gets reported very differently. Some we'll say it's only half a square mile, some even less than that. But we know that it's less than a square mile about one point five square kilometers estimate. And it sits about two miles off of New Zealand's South Island's northern shore, at the northern edge of the Marlborough Sounds. And the weather on the island is mild in temperatures, but there is frequent rain and often high winds. It was renamed Stephens Island after Philip Stephens, the late eighteenth century first Secretary to the Admiralty of the United Kingdom. Prior to the eighteen seventies, it hadn't been explored by any Anglo parties. It's unknown if any Maori people's visited it prior to that, but it was a pristine place in terms of its ecological condition when maritime officials from New Zealand first visited it, and because the island sits on a shipping route and there had been several shipwrecks nearby in the middle of the century, it was outfitted with an oiled powered lighthouse in eighteen ninety four. That lighthouse stood at the highest elevation point above sea level of any lighthouse in New Zealand at the time. It was also more power full than any others in New Zealand at that time, and it cost more than nine thousand pounds to build. Before the lighthouse was installed to illuminate the Cooks Strait's western approaches, Stephens Island was almost entirely untouched. There were no non native species that had been introduced. The flora was just a natural and unchecked and undeveloped. Well into the eighteen hundreds, the tiny island was pretty densely forested. When workers first arrived in eighteen ninety two to start construction on the lighthouse, birds were abundant. The journals of one of the men, Fw Ingram, are quoted in a two thousand and four paper about the extinction of the wren. That paper was written by Ross Galbreeze and Derek Brown, and according to Ingram's account, there were two kinds of wren saddlebacks, native thrush and native crows on the island when the work began. There After, the lighthouse and a small farm were established. An estimated ninety percent of the island's native forest was to destroyed due to grazing and fire. A patchy low forest eventually established and remains in the place of the thick forest that had been destroyed, and shrubs, grasses, and vine lens persisted also. So with this new fancy lighthouse, the island needed a lighthouse keeper. So we are getting now into the story as it's usually told. So in eighteen ninety four, David Lyle moved to Stephen's Island to fill that position, and the island was not easy to get to. Travelers had to cross Cook straight by boat and then board a basket that was attached to the station's crane, and after that there was an uphill walk of about one hundred and eighty meters or one hundred and ninety six yards to the lighthouse itself. This was a pretty extreme solitary type position that you would accept. Lyle, his wife and a son also brought along a cat named Tibbles when they moved to Stephen's Island. The idea was that Tibbles would keep the mice at bay and also be a companion for this lonely outpost. They were not the island's only residents actually, but we'll come back to that. Of course, a good mouser such as Tibbles would also probably be interested in going after small nocturnal birds as well, especially since, as Holly said earlier, they've been described as mouse like. But that was never the intention. They did not on purpose bring a cat to kill birds. No, and usually when you hear this story told, they really only talk about David Lyle and Tibbles, and any family is kind of left out. But so not long after David and Tibbles and his family arrived on the island, the cat started bringing fresh kills to her human Lyle was interested in nature, and he was an amateur ornithologist, and he had never seen a bird quite like the ones that Tibbles was killing. So he examined them and he skinned them as he did to you know, more fully take account of what their body was like and what these birds were. When a shit brought supplies to the island on its regular bimonthly schedule, Lyle sent one of his rin skins back on it, intending for it to reach a well known ornithologist, Sir Walter Buller, it's believed that he did receive this skin sometime in July eighteen ninety four. Later on, Beller would write quote, there is probably nothing so refreshing to the soul of a naturalist as the discovery of a new species. You will readily understand. Therefore, how pleased I was at receiving the skin of a bird from stephen Island, which was entirely distinct from anything hitherto known. Eventually, Lyle collected ten samples. That number is going to shift around when we get to the reality, but for the purposes of this story, ten samples from Tibble's offering, and they were in good condition because the cat seemed to be more interested in killing the birds than she wasn't eating them. Feline behaviorists might also suggest that she was bringing them to Lyle as a means of offering him provisions showing she could take care of him as well as herself. There are also theories that cats do that to try to teach us stupid humans how to find our own food. But in any case, she was not eating them, so they were in quite good condition. After he had been examining these various specimens, Buller realized that the birds Lyle had been collecting from Tibbles were a previously unidentified species of wren, so one of these Buller sent to London to the British Ornithologists Union so it could be illustrated, and he also was preparing his research and findings so that he could publish his discovery of the Stephens Island wren in the journal Ibis. It was believed that there had likely been ten mating pairs of the wren on Stephen's Island before Tibbles the cat got there. This is not a large number of birds, to be sure, so it would not really take very long for an enterprising cat with decent hunting skills to severely damage those numbers. In eighteen ninety five, just a year after Lyle and his cat had arrived on the island, the christ Church Press commented on Tibbles's work, quote, there is very good reason to believe that the bird is no longer to be found on this island, as it is not known to exist anywhere else. It has apparently become quite extinct. This is probably a record performance in the way of extermination, and according to legend, Tibbles wiped out the Stephens Island wren almost as soon as it was recognized as a newly discovered species. So that's the story that you usually get told in a quickie articles yep, or in like a one sentence throwaway line in the context of something completely different. It will be like and there was even an entire species of bird killed by the light keeper's cat. Yeah, but there is a lot more to this story. And before we dive into that bigger, more detailed version of what happened to the Stephens Island wren, we're gonna pause and have a word from one of our sponsors. While the story of Tibble's and the Stephens Island wren is a cautionary tale about the day of invasive species, and that is a very legitimate concern, the very simplified version that is normally shared leaves out some more complex and nuanced elements to the decline of one species due to the import of another, as well as the involvement of many more players in the narrative, as we are definitely not now playing the threat of invasive species, but that there's a bigger story going on here. During the construction period for the lighthouse, an anonymous collector had visited the island to gather specimens. Gal Breath and Brown put forth the theory in their paper that the collector, which was a pseudonym used by that person in question when publishing in the Wellington Evening Post, was in fact none other than the local natural history dealer, which was a man named Henry H. Travers, and before Lyle and Tibble's even set foot on the island, Sir Walter Buller was aware of a number of birds to be found there, most likely due to the accounts that the collector had published in the paper or through contact with Travers himself. Of note, however, no wren was actually mentioned in the writings of the collector. I also just love that he wrote as the collector, because of course there's the whole Guardians of the Galaxy comedy tian that we could do. But he had not mentioned the ren at all in any of these writings, and there were no mentions of a wren in the comments of Buller at a January eighteen ninety three meeting of the Wellington Philosophical Society, where he discussed some of the unique birds that could be found on Stephen's Island. Buller also suggested at that meeting that two other New Zealand islands, Resolution Island and Little Barrier Island, could be used as preservation grounds for some of the bird species that were experiencing population decline on the mainland, but it appears that no similar consideration was given to Stephens Island. Regarding David Lyle and Tibbles, we mentioned a few moments ago so that they were not the only ones who had moved onto the island. In fact, there were three lighthouse keepers in their families, as well as a teacher to see to the children's education seventeen people in all at the start of eighteen ninety four, when the lighthouse became operational. While Lyle was sending his samples to Buller, at some point Henry Travers also became aware of the unique items being relayed by Lyle through an intermediary aboard the supply ship. Travers and Buller were not unknown to each other. As a dealer in natural items. Travers had none business with Buller on a number of occasions, and Travers s felt as though such rare and unique specimens could be sold for more than Buller was able to pay. He convinced Lyle to sell him some of the wren's skins. Yeah, so, in addition to whatever activities are happening, we are now seeing an uptick in human interest in these birds. And this is where yet another man enters the picture, the honorable Walter Rothschild, who had dealt with both Travers and Buller as specimen dealers prior to this new discovery of the Stevens Island wren, and as a wealthy Englishman, Rothschild had both the means to pay handsomely for rare specimens and the connections to publish information about them before Buller could. There actually was some realization among the British Ornithologists involved in publishing the IBIS and the British Ornithologists Club Proceedings periodical to which Rothschild to which Rothschild's research had been presented, that there were two men describing the same find but both went to press yes. So for clarity, at this point, Travers has started selling to a very rich person in London, Rothschild. At the same time Buller is also purchasing these samples and they are writing up about this newly discovered species, and they both presented to both the IBIS and the British Ornithologists Club's proceedings, just their little period their notes on their meetings, and that's a small enough group that there were a lot of crossover people going, hey, we don't we have a thing from that guy Buller about this? Didn't that ring ye before? Yeah, but we're going forward with this too. So they both published, and it was a little bit of a gentleman's drama. So Roth's child named the wrend Traversia leali in the proceedings that was published in December of eighteen ninety four. When Buller's paper came out in April of eighteen ninety five, the bird was called Xenicus in Solaris. And this entire chain of events caused massive friction between the two men, each declaring that the other had not been a gentleman. You may recall from the beginning when we talked about the bird that it is called Xenicus and then sometimes traversia in parentheses leali. So in the end there was sort of a a combining of the two in the scientific community. This is like a much smaller in every sense of the word, version of the bone Wars. Yes, But even before four Buller's paper, which was printed by ibis that editorial from the christ Church Press we mentioned earlier that declared the wren likely extinct had already come out. So there was already an article saying the bird was probably extinct before the scientific paper on it. Yeah, so there was the first printed stuff in December. In March that article came out in the christ Church Paper saying there are no more of these birds. And then in April Buller's paper was published saying I have discovered a new kind of bird. It's a very complex and tightly packed timeline in terms of like discovery and when this bird was thought to have ended. So in March of eighteen ninety five, Traverse wrote to Rothschild a letter that suggested that he was hunting wren's himself to send to London. Quote. I have recently returned from a special trip to Stephen's Island, where I went to have a good hunt for more specimens of Traversia Lealey, but unfortunately without success. I hunted the island over and round, and as I had three men with me who formed my boat crew and some of the residents of the island, you can imagine we made a thorough search. I did not get any specimens of the bird. I went specifically four, although mister Lyle's boy gave me a specimen that had been found just alive by the owner of the cat that had caught the others, and this his father had put into spirit. So at that point cumans are also hunting the bird. That claim of extinction in early eighteen ninety five may have been premature. For one. Travers seems to have used the news of the extinction to charge higher prices for the preserved bird specimens that he offered to collectors after that, so he might have been perpetuating this claim of extinction for his own financial gain. Yeah, if you look at how his prices rated. That first one that he sent to Rothschild, I think he charged five pounds for and then he tried to charge thirty five pounds four and was eventually talked down to twelve if I'm remembering correctly. So he was definitely like, they're no more of this bird. It is a lot more expensive now. But both Travers and Buller each received additional specimens for several years after eighteen ninety five, so even after he denounced personal collecting of endangered species specimens, Buller continued to seek out the Stevens Island wren for himself, and when I say that, I mean in specimen form, not live Steven's Island wrens. He also made purchases for his son to have them, as well as at least one other ornithologist, and Buller for the Record maintained in his notes that all samples of the bird had come from David Lyle, and thus that would be from his cat. But that gets into some weird issues, as there are specimens in museums that are labeled as late as eighteen ninety nine, well after Lyle had actually moved on from the Stevens Island Lighthouse job. Additionally, there are completely mismatched accounts of just how many preserved wrens there are floating around. If you compare the records and letters of Travers and Buller, things do not match up at all. Travers was still selling Steven's Island wrens into the early nineteen hundreds, but it's unclear whether those were items that he had been hanging on to for several years or if they were new acquisitions. Additionally, even those records might not truly reflect the lots that Travers was selling at the time, so there's no way to verify even the existence of Travers stock of the extinct bird, let alone its condition relative to its age. Yeah, there's one story of a museum that discovered that they had a lot that someone had purchased from Travers, but it was largely destroyed. It had not been properly cared for, so they did not account for whether or not there was a wren in the mix. There there's a lot of not really fantastic record keeping, which leads to a lot of the nebulous aspects of this story. So the thing is, though, that collecting may have really had a significant hand in the ex distinction of the Stevens Island wren, But we don't actually know if Traver's ever managed to catch any the two times that he claimed he tried, the one that we read his writings about earlier, and there was one other time. He reported that he failed on both of those occasions, And there are additional factors too. Remember earlier when we mentioned that there were other people who moved to the island in addition to David Lyle and Tibbles, Apparently someone else in that group of people also brought at least one other cat, or possibly Tibbles was pregnant when she arrived, because within a few years there was a cat population on Stephen's Island, not just one cat. And it's also possible that the name Tibbles was just attached to the story later it wasn't even Lyle's cat in the first place, but just a cat that happened to be around. Yeah, it's like I said, it's been simplified in a really fun way to tell, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the reality. And we're going to talk more about the cats on Stephen's Island and what happened to all those bird bodies after we first take a little sponsor break. So right before we went to break, Tracy was saying that there was a cat population at some point on the island, and it's unclear when exactly it became more than one cat, or if it had always been more than one cat. There are mentions of other cats in notes and writings made by people about those early days of the Lighthouse community, but these are all anecdotal and they were written after the facts, so they're not especially reliable. As early as eighteen ninety five, though Lyle was writing notes to Buller about the available birds on the island, and he specifically references some of them being scarce due to cats plural. He also describes those cats as having become wild, so there was already the beginning of a feral population. Like a year after he had arrived ninety seven, the cat population was noted by a lighthouse keeper as being a quote large number. The report that description was included in also suggested that some means of destroying the cats had to be found. A few years later, in nineteen oh one, the native reptile population was also in danger and a bounty was established on the cats. Yeah, at that point they were kind of like, well, the birds are already gone, so we'll figure this out. And it got put off within and then they were like there was a very glorious reptile population on Steven's Island, and they were like, Okay, we can't let this happen again. Now we have to kill the cats, which sucks. This is reminding me of the webcomic camp We Don't Watch You. I don't know if you've ever read that, but it is a camp about children who have been sent by their parents to this camp because they are not wanted for whatever reason, and one of the early strips there is whatever one thinks is going to be a food drop, but it turns out to be a box full of feral cats. And every installment of the strip after that has a cat hidden somewhere. So in nineteen oh five, this was four years after the cat bounty was established, Sir Walter Buehler made a written suggestion that cats should no longer ever be allowed on the island or on any other isolated islands where native species could fall victim to their pre drive, and he also included the suggestion that if mice were a concern, for example, if people were going to take care of the lighthouse and they were worried about mice, that the state should provide, at state expense, mouse traps rather than allow feline rodent management in such places. Over the course of more than two decades, hundreds of cats were shot on Stephen's Island, and in nineteen twenty five the island was declared to be free of cats. So, even though it is not really entirely fair to blame Tibble's ending the Stevens Island, Wren the role of cats in shifting the balance of wildlife populations is one which has been debated for some time, and cats most assuredly were responsible for the majority of the deaths of those birds, and they were threatening other native wildlife on the island after those wrens were gone. According to a study published in Nature in twenty thirteen, free ranging domestic cats in the United States were estimated to kill one point three to four billion birds that's billion with a bee and six point three to twenty two point three billion also with a b mammals annually. For the purposes of that study, domestic cats included both cats that have a home that are allowed to roam and strays including ferrells, with homeless cats responsible for most of those kills. That same study also commented that quote free ranging cats on islands has caused or contributed to thirty three or fourteen percent of the modern bird, mammal and reptile extinctions recorded by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List. Humans are still trying to figure out how to manage cab populations in ways that are humane in order to curtail the unbalanced mortality in other species that can result from even well fed but still prey driven animals. While cats, as we discussed on an older episode, have become part of human culture both for their excellent pest hunting skills as well as their companionship, they are also very very good at multiplying at a really rapid rate, so efforts to find and execute a solution still continue. As an aside, it appears to have been Rothschild's account of the entire situation that first pinned the loss of the entire species on tibbles, and then that was repeated for simplicity for more than one hundred years. Yeah, and Rothschild this whole time, we should point out, was in London. It wasn't like he was on the sea. He wrote this after the fact and having never actually been to the place where this was taking place. And as for what happened to all of those deceased birds that were collected on the tiny island, there are fifteen wren specimens accounted for, and those have made their way into museum collections around the world. Of the samples Rothschild gathered, the Natural History Museum in London has three, The Museum of Natural History in New York has four. The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia has one, and the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts has one. The three that Buller had, one for himself and two for his son, are in the Canterbury Museum, christ Church, which has two, and the last is in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. There are also Stephens Island wren specimens at the Colonial Museum now the Museum of New Zealand Tipapa Tongarewa. I am probably mispronouncing that I could not find a good pronunciation example which is in Wellington and the Otago Museum in Dunedin, and that one actually lists two, but only one is clearly accounted for, so there's a little bit of fuzzy fuzziness there as well. The Stephens Island Lighthouse still exists. It was converted from oil to electric in the late nineteen thirties and then was automated in the late nineteen eighties. In nineteen eighty nine, the last lighthouse keeper left the island. It's not open to the public and the Maritime New Zealand's Wellington Office conducts operation and monitoring of the lighthouse remotely. Yeah, if you want to go to the island, you're probably a scientist because there are still multiple rare species on the island, particularly what has been described by scientists as a diverse reptile community. It is now in nature reserve. For example, a reptile called the Tuitata is of particular import on Stephen's Island as it is the only surviving species of its order. They are also the cutest things, in my opinion, if you see pictures of them, they just have very cute, little expressive faces. I saw some videos of one. Apparently there was a reintroduction effort yeah with them, and as I was looking for examples, I was like, I was looking for videos of New Zealanders saying all these words, and then I got down a rabbit hole of looking at lizard videos. They're really cute, and it really has become New Zealand is really making a massive effort at conservation, and in part of in part, this whole episode is the driver of some of those efforts. Like people realized, oh, if we are not thoughtful about how we handle particularly these small islands that are harboring things that cannot be found anywhere else and are small in number, we will then make sure those never exist on the earth again. And we don't want that. So there is a lot of care going into trying to preserve native species. Yeah, so that is the more complicated than just tibbles. The cat eate all the birds of how the Stephens Island RN went extinct. Yeah, although cats were responsible for a lot of it. I sounded a lot more chipper when I said yeah than the story actually warrants. Yeah. So only in museums now in their deceased forum unfortunately. Yes, thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. 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