Hello Carolyn
I can't help you with mouse tails from Pitt Island but I can offer you some mouse tales. I would value your comments.
In the course of researching the likely extirpation date of black robins on Pitt Island for my doctoral study, I've consulted much old literature and some old Pitt Islanders. The conclusion I've drawn so far is that mice did not arrive on Pitt Island until after 1867 (see below). By this time, Frederick Hunt had been farming on the island for ~ 25 years. He had developed 240 acres of clearings comprising English grasses in what was otherwise a fully forested island.
You would consider it a very high probability that Hunt had introduced mice accidentally with his grass seed. But in his account of his Chathams expedition, H. H. Travers (1868: 178) appears very careful to say that mice were on Chatham Island at that time but not on Pitt Island. Wild cats were in abundance on both. Travers used Pitt as his base and resided with the Hunt family for many months, so if mice (and black robins) had been on Pitt Island at that time, he is sure to have encountered them.
Fast forward to 1900. I asked Bill Carter, Pitt Island descendant and author of the farming histories of Pitt, Rangatira and Mangere Islands (in press), what he knew of mice arrival on the island. He told me that Pitt Island was mouse-free until about 1900, when a 'pregnant' mouse was seen to escape from a bag of flour unloaded from a supply ship at Flower Pot.
This is anecdote of course but the small Pitt Island community holds fast to heritage stories of this kind. How the locals understood the mouse to be pregnant is not explained, though perhaps the subsequent appearance of lots of mice gave rise to inference. I'm sure a search of letters and diaries of the time might corroborate this story if a noteworthy explosion in mouse numbers followed first arrival. If you accept Bill's story, then the departure points for Pitt Island supply vessels of that time might also throw some light on the origins of the mice. Less reliable I suppose than molecular analyses.
From this threadbare information, I've concluded that mice arrived on Pitt Island after 1867 and perhaps not before 1900. What the wild cats were eating in the meantime is a mystery. According to newspaper accounts from the late 1880s and early 1900s, their densities on Pitt were legendarily high. Assuming that they arrived with the first sealers and whalers (c. 1800), they must surely have cleaned out most available avian prey.
I would certainly appreciate your comments on this. If mice did arrive on the Glory in 1827, then I'm less able to say that cats alone extirpated the robins on the island.
Regards
