Holocene extinction may have put some pressure on other birds but at the time of early European contact (18th Century) and colonisation (19th Century) the bird life was prolific. With them, the Europeans brought ship rats, possums, cats and mustelids which decimated native bird life, some of which had adapted flightlessness and ground nesting habits and others had no defensive behavior as a result of having no extant endemic mammalian predators. The kakapo, the world's biggest parrot, which is flightless, now only exists in managed breeding sanctuaries. New Zealand's national emblem, the kiwi, is on the endangered bird list. There has been
Rakiura National Park the national park. Many native birds can be found within the park, and Rakiura offers perhaps the best opportunity anywhere in New Zealand for viewing kiwi in the wild. This is in part due to the absence of stoats and ferrets. Certain coastal areas of this park are breeding areas for the endangered yellow-eyed penguin. Weka, a flightless and curious bird species, can only be found on offshore islands. In the 1970s, kakapo were found in the Tin Range at a time when it was thought that the species was nearly extinct. The kakapo have been transferred to nearby Codfish