iordland’s spectacular sheer-sided sounds were gouged out of the mountains during the last ice age. The western heights are greatly affected by the winds of the Roaring Forties and rain falls in prodigious amounts - almost 7300 millimetres a year on average at Milford Sound - making Fiordland one of the wettest places on earth.

This high precipitation nourishes the lush beech forest with its dense undergrowth. Higher up, nearer the tree-line, this gives way to stunted beech, leatherwood and mountain fuchsia, their branches festooned with hanging, delicate grey lichen called Old Man's Beard.

Despite the rain, the steep-sided fiords offer good, sheltered anchorages which attracted sailors from the time of Cook onwards and made Fiordland, with Marlborough and Northland, a site of much early scientific discovery.

Most of this work was centred in Dusky Sound, which although inaccessible by road can be reached by float-plane or by launch and road from the Manapouri Hydro Scheme via the Spey and Seaforth rivers. Here at Dusky Sound James Cook spent nearly seven weeks in 1773 and during this time the ship’s naturalist, Johann Rheinhold Forster, did a great deal of collecting. Of the 36 species collected here, some 30 were later described and have Dusky Sound as their type locality.

Collecting seems to have been a bloody affair. After one foray Forster wrote: 'At our return we found about nine shags, about 40 waterhens, 27 ducks, one curlew, one woodcock, one sandpiper, 11 large pigeon, several pohebirds [tui], two large parrots, a parakeet & several small birds had been killed.’ Cook himself shot a whio - a 'Duck of Blue grey Plumage with the end of its bin as soft as the lips of any animal.' Birds were not the only animals collected. The crew landed fish at every opportunity and among those listed as caught were blue cod, scorpion-fish, trumpeters, scarlet wrasse and . The local wildlife must have been delighted when they finally set sail.

After Cook things were never the same again in Dusky Sound. By the end of the eighteenth century sealers had arrived and within a few years had annhilated the fur seal colonies. The first living takahe to come to the attention of the scientific world was collected here at Dusky Sound in 1849 and Richard Henry started transferring endangered birds from here to island sanctuaries in 1895.

Henry was a naturalist of great talent, endless patience and with a boundless sympathy for. his 'strange wingless birds and flightless ones too.' Working often alone in primitive conditions, and in some of the worst weather imaginable, he transferred kakapo, great spotted kiwi and brown kiwi to Resolution Island in Dusky Sound. Kakapo were solitary creatures and each had an extensive home range of up to 50 hectares, so capturing one meant a lot of hard work. During the period from April 1895 to December 1897, Henry moved a total of 474 kakapo and kiwi to Resolution Island, an average of 14 birds a month.