Nigel and the Real Gannet

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Oh, wait, you're listening.

**Chris Bell** (0:03)
Okay.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:08)
You are listening to Radiolab.

**Latif Nasser** (0:11)
Radiolab.

**Lulu Miller** (0:11)
From WNYC.

**Latif Nasser** (0:19)
Hey, this is Radiolab, I'm Latif Nasser, and today we have a small story about a small life that touched people all over the world.

**Lulu Miller** (0:29)
Okay.

**SPEAKER_9** (0:30)
One, two, three.

**Latif Nasser** (0:31)
And it doesn't end the way you want it to.

**Lulu Miller** (0:34)
There's a door.

**Annie McEwen** (0:35)
Get it up. You'll be fine up.

**Lulu Miller** (0:36)
Okay.

**Latif Nasser** (0:37)
Comes to us from producer Annie McEwen.

**Chris Bell** (0:40)
Hi, Annie.

**Latif Nasser** (0:40)
And it starts with a total loner.

**Chris Bell** (0:43)
Yeah, exactly.

**Annie McEwen** (0:44)
Okay, let's picture you. I imagine that you're tall and you stride around the island like hiking boots.

**Chris Bell** (0:53)
Like, gosh, yes, tall, so tall I've got quite bad posture and sort of loom around.

**Annie McEwen** (0:58)
Oh, so you're hunching around the island.

**Chris Bell** (1:00)
Hunching and stalking, yes.
Scowling. But under a sun hat, because the sun's pretty strong in New Zealand.

**Chris Bell** (1:08)
This is Chris Bell.

**Annie McEwen** (1:09)
And back about a decade ago, he was the sole inhabitant of an island off the west coast of New Zealand called Mana Island.

**Chris Bell** (1:17)
Oh, gosh. It's like the perfect size of island. It's not too big, not too small.

**Annie McEwen** (1:22)
Nose to tail. It takes about an hour and a half to walk across.

**Chris Bell** (1:25)
Yeah, looking down. Yeah, of course.

**Annie McEwen** (1:27)
It's got cliffs, a high grassy plateau, shrubs and woodland. And Chris lived there in an old farmhouse.

**Chris Bell** (1:33)
Yeah, a wood stove and...

**Annie McEwen** (1:35)
Did you make your own food all the time?

**Chris Bell** (1:36)
Well, there's no one else to make it for me, so yeah.

**Annie McEwen** (1:39)
Although he did share the house with...

**Chris Bell** (1:40)
Handfuls of geckos.

**Annie McEwen** (1:41)
A whole bunch of geckos.

**Chris Bell** (1:43)
The soonest evening came, you would hear them rattling about in the roof space.

**Annie McEwen** (1:46)
And sometimes he'd get human visitors, but...

**Chris Bell** (1:48)
Very common to go 10 days without seeing or hearing anybody else.

**Annie McEwen** (1:52)
Often, he'd be totally alone.

**Chris Bell** (1:54)
Yeah.

**Latif Nasser** (1:56)
Okay. And what is...

**Annie McEwen** (1:58)
How did he...

**Latif Nasser** (1:59)
Why is he... Is he spurning civilization? What is he doing there?

**Annie McEwen** (2:03)
Well, this island was sort of in a state of recovery.

**Chris Bell** (2:06)
Gosh, it was farmed for many years.

**Annie McEwen** (2:08)
For 100 plus years, it had been used as farmland.

**Chris Bell** (2:11)
I think it was sheep and cattle. And well, in all this time, the wildlife took a big hit.

**Annie McEwen** (2:16)
The sheep and the cows ate all the grass and trees.

**Chris Bell** (2:19)
And invasive species arrived, particularly mice.

**Annie McEwen** (2:22)
And the mice ate the eggs of the birds and lizards that lived on the island and reduced this ecosystem to basically a wasteland. But then, in the 1980s, the Department of Conservation of New Zealand stepped in and got rid of all the mice and all the sheep.

**Chris Bell** (2:36)
And once the mice were gone and planting restoration began.

**Annie McEwen** (2:39)
They thought, let's use this island as like a safe haven for fragile species who need a bit of like tender loving care and place to sort of find their feet again.

**Chris Bell** (2:49)
So the island was home to things like McGregor's Skink and Goldstriped Gekko and the Cookstrait Giant Weta.

**Latif Nasser** (2:54)
The Weta?

**Chris Bell** (2:55)
Which is a giant lumbering grasshopper.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:58)
Oh my god.

**Annie McEwen** (2:59)
There are kiwi birds, little blue penguins called Karora's.

**Latif Nasser** (3:03)
So cute.

**Annie McEwen** (3:03)
This endangered bird called the Takahe.

**Chris Bell** (3:05)
Which is like giant blue chicken. I mean, it absolutely shouldn't exist and almost didn't.

**Annie McEwen** (3:10)
And to protect all this fragility, the Department of Conservation installed a single human inhabitant, a ranger, and for a time, that ranger was Chris.

**Chris Bell** (3:21)
14th of November 2016, that evening was calm and mild.

**Annie McEwen** (3:25)
His journal from the island is filled with two diving petrol burrows to check counting seabirds and cutting grass for the better part of the day. clearing meadows checking wax tags that monitor for invasive rodents keeping the island pest free and just generally clearing weeds, digging culverts, tending the nursery, building and dismantling doing what needed doing.