This is a story of one of the little known heroes of NZ conservation. Henry, possessing a real love of birds and a very clear understanding of how their native populations were being decimated through human actions (introduction of pests such as rats and ferrets, land clearance, hunting and so on) tried to set up the first island reserve, on Resolution Island in Fiordland. He transplanted endangered birds such as kiwi and kakapo to Resolution and the smaller islands around it, trying to keep the populations alive, and his slow realisation that he can't is horrible to read.

Henry is such an interesting character. He spends so much of his life in isolation, out in torrential, remote Fiordland, and the Hills don't gloss over the difficulties of what this is like in the late 19th/early 20th century. It doesn't help that Henry is terribly lonely, prone to depression, at one point actively suicidal (he shoots himself in the head but it doesn't work)... He's a genuinely sympathetic figure. I wanted him to succeed. I knew that he didn't. The reserve failed, the birds died.

Now, kakapo and takahe and kiwi teeter on the brink, even more vulnerable than they were in Henry's day. Interestingly, the epilogue makes it clear that Henry was well in advance of his time with his pioneering conservation efforts - today, NZ's Department of Conservation relies on island reserves to keep our endangered species alive - and, futile as it seemed to him at the time, his knowledge was invaluable in setting them up. It's such an interesting book, extremely well-researched, on such an interesting man. I wish he could have seen what his work led to. It might have made life a little easier for him.