New Zealand

New Zealand broke away from Gondwana some eighty million years ago and was left without land mammals apart from a couple of bat species, so it was the birds that took on every ecological role: there were herbivorous birds the size of a horse, predatory birds at the top of the chain and many that lost the power of flight because nothing hunted them. The arrival of humans and of the rats, stoats and possums they brought with them triggered one of the most severe island extinctions on the planet. The country retains glaciers, fjords, active volcanoes, podocarp and southern beech forests, and has turned its predator-free islands into arks in which to rebuild its original ecosystems.