The first bullet ripped through his skin and lodged in the side of his skull. The impact temporarily froze his right hand, but he was still alive. Intent on doing himself in, he twisted the cold barrel perpendicular to his head and again pulled the trigger. This time the gun misfired. Providence? He put the gun down.

Until that lonely night in Mt Eden, Auckland, in 1893, when the “black dog” moods overpowered him, Richard Henry had always been soothed by the Fiordland wilderness. He had spent a decade observing the patterns of life around him in the temperate rainforest and recording their demise. He had built a following among readers of the Otago Witness with his accounts of the day-to-day dramas of flightless birds. The embryonic conservationist community had recognised his rare talent as a field naturalist and communicator and nominated him as their preferred candidate for conservator of Fiordland’s newly reserved Resolution Island.

Henry had thus become entangled in the combative back-room politics of colonial New Zealand. A growing minority viewed the native flora and fauna as valuable and worth preserving, but they were hamstrung by a plodding bureaucracy. Policy and politics were unfamiliar territory to 48-year-old Henry, whose frustration at powerlessness exacerbated depression brought on by physical deterioration after years of hard physical toil.

While waiting for government funds that would allow him to become established as curator of Resolution Island, Henry tidied up his affairs. He left his small pole house in Te Anau and set out to raise scientific interest in his theories on kakapo breeding. Because he wasn’t scientifically trained and didn’t follow the conventions, or use the language, of science, scientists didn’t know what to make of his extraordinary observations. He felt humiliated by their rejection. Of Frederick Hutton, professor of biology at Canterbury College and curator of Canterbury Museum, Henry observed: “...he thinks more of a classical name than about a curious and wonderful fact. He seemed not to take a bit of interest in my story about kakapos but was very anxious to explain to me some straw-splitting difference that shifted a bird out of one class and into another.”

That night in Mt Eden, Henry felt he had outlived his usefulness. “It was purely a personal matter and when I was not in good working trim it was of no matter to anyone,” he later wrote to his friend Edward Melland, a well-connected Dunedin businessman and conservationist. “You know we all have to clear out and I think it a privilege to have the choice of how, where and when.”