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
Kakapo present and the kakapo were never seen again. In 1912, three kakapo were moved to another reserve, Kapiti Island, north-west of Wellington. One of them survived until at least 1936, despite the presence of feral cats for part of the intervening period. By the 1920s, the kakapo was extinct in the North Island and its range and numbers in the South Island were declining. One of its last refuges was rugged Fiordland. There, during the 1930s, it was often seen or heard, and occasionally eaten, by hunters or roadworkers. By the 1940s, reports of kakapo were becoming scarce. In the