Stephens Island is a tiny, windswept patch of land in the Cook Strait, wedged between New Zealand's North and South Islands, and for more than a century it has been remembered for one particular story, a cat supposedly wiping out an entire species of bird almost single handedly. The bird in question was Lyall's wren, a small, flightless songbird found nowhere else on earth, and the cat was Tibbles, brought to the island in 1894 by assistant lighthouse keeper David Lyall. According to popular legend, Tibbles alone hunted the wren into extinction within about a year of arriving, a tale so tidy and dramatic that it has been repeated in documentaries, quiz shows and nature books ever since. The real story, as researchers have since pieced together, turns out to be a good deal messier than the legend suggests.
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