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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