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The Pit of Death That Holds the History of New Zealand’s Flightless Birds

Alan Tennyson holds more than 20 fossilized kakapo beaks. Just 154 of the birds are alive today.
Alan Tennyson holds more than 20 fossilized kakapo beaks. Just 154 of the birds are alive today.

The lush vineyards of Martinborough, New Zealand, sit upon a thick crust of limestone. At one time, a few thousand years ago, the rocky landscape was entirely covered with thick native bush, and was home to countless reptiles and flightless birds, carousing and careening beneath the canopy, with nary a human in sight.

The forest also concealed the limestone’s pits and troughs—presenting a fatal risk to clumsy or unwary kakapo or takahe. Thousands of these birds met their demise in one particular hidden limestone cave, known technically as a “pitfall trap.” Once they fell in, there was no way out without flight-functional wings. Over the last century, enthusiasts and scientists have collected fossils from as many as 1,000 individuals from this cave, making it the richest site in the whole country for avian and reptilian fossils.

From the outside, the cave seems unspectacular, but no one knows quite how deep it goes. A deer hunter first stumbled across it in 1914, without…

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