[Illustration: AT THE HEAD OF LAKE TE-ANAU] It was decided, therefore, to set aside such island sanctuaries, and to station paid care-takers on them. There are now three of these insular refuges: Resolution Island, off Dusky Sound; Kapiti, in Cook’s Strait; and the Little Barrier Island, at the mouth of the Hauraki Gulf. The broken and richly-wooded Resolution contains some 50,000 acres, and is as good a place for its present uses as could be found. Remote from settlement, drenched by continual rains, it attracts no one but a casual sight-seer. On the other hand, its care-taker is in close touch with the whole region of the fiords, and can watch over and to some extent guard the wild life therein. The experiences of this officer, Mr. Richard Henry, are uncommon enough. For twelve years he lived near lakes Manapouri and Te Anau studying the birds on that side of the wilderness. Since 1900 he has been stationed on the western coast, at Pigeon Island, near Resolution. There, with such society as a boy and a dog can afford him, this guardian of birds passes year after year in a climate where the rainfall ranges, I suppose, from 140 inches to 200 in the twelvemonth. Inured to solitude and sandflies Mr. Henry appears sufficiently happy in watching the habits of his favourite birds, their enemies the beasts, and their neighbours the sea-fish. He can write as well as observe, and his reports and papers are looked for by all who care for Nature in our country. It is odd that in so vast a wilderness, and one so densely clothed with vegetation as are the mountains and valleys of the south-west, there should not be room enough and to spare for the European singing-birds as well as the native kind. But if we are to believe the care-taker at Resolution Island--and better testimony than his could not easily be had,--the sparrow alone, to say nothing of the thrush and blackbird, is almost as deadly an enemy as the flightless birds have. For the sparrow not only takes a share of the insects which are supposed to be his food, but consumes more than his share of the honey of the rata and other native flowers. Six sparrows which Mr. Henry managed to kill with a lucky shot one summer morning were found to be plump and full of honey--it oozed out of their beaks. Thrushes and blackbirds are just as ready to take to a vegetable diet, so that the angry care-taker is driven to denounce the birds of Europe as “jabbering sparrows and other musical humbugs that come here under false pretences.” Then the native birds themselves are not always forbearing to each other. The wekas, the commonest and most active of the flightless birds, are remorseless thieves, and will steal the eggs of wild ducks or farm poultry indifferently. Though as big as a domestic fowl, wekas are no great fighters: a bantam cock, or even a bantam hen, will rout the biggest of them. On the other hand, Mr. Henry has seen a weka tackle a bush rat and pin it down in its hole under a log.