Until relatively recently—in the evolutionary scale of things—the wildlife of New Zealand consisted of almost nothing but birds. Only birds could reach the place. The ancestors of many of the birds that are now natives of New Zealand originally flew there. There was also a couple of species of bats, which are mammals, but—and this is the point—there were no predators. No dogs, no cats, no ferrets or weasels, nothing that the birds needed to escape from particularly.
