The Black Robin and the Power of Tenacious Tenderness: How a Single Mother Brought an Entire Species Back from the Brink of Extinction

This essay is adapted from Traversal. “In the great chain of cause and effect,” Alexander von Humboldt wrote as he was teaching science to read the poetry of nature, “no single fact can be considered in isolation.” When the first European colonists made landfall on New Zealand’s shores in Humboldt’s lifetime, the cats and rats that descended from their ships began decimating the native population…