Lassie the bird dog

I just got the heads up from @SiroccoKakapo from his twitter feed www.twitter.com/SiroccoKakapo About Richard Henry http://bit.ly/1lFF3t and how he tried (100 years ago!) to protect us from stoats? http://bit.ly/41lbuE

Source: Te Ara

http://teara.govt.nz/en/european-discovery-of-plants-and-animals/6/1

Lassie the bird dog
Richard Henry was an early conservationist who shared many of the concerns of naturalists. His dog Lassie was trained for sniffing out kākāpō (flightless parrots). Many naturalists lamented the decline in bird life and rightly laid the blame on introduced mammalian predators such as rats and stoats. Henry relocated kākāpō on Resolution Island, Fiordland, in the 1890s in an attempt to give them a predator-free haven. He failed, as stoats swam across to the island in 1900 and killed off the birds. But his idea lives on, and many native species today survive only on offshore islands from which predators have been removed.