Stephens Island is at the northernmost tip of the Marlborough Sounds in the South Island of New Zealand. It lies two kilometres to the northeast of Cape Stephens, the northernmost point of D'Urville Island. The island is in size, and rises high from the sea. History The island was owned by the Ngāti Koata iwi but was taken by the government to build a lighthouse in 1891. The Māori called it Takapourewa ("around the tower") but explorer Captain Cook renamed it Stephens Island in 1770 after Sir Phillip Stephens, Secretary of the Admiralty. The island featured in local mythos as the place where a local lighthouse keeper's cat, named Tibbles, was claimed to have caused the extinction of Lyall's wren in 1894. However, this belief was erroneous, an urban legend. While this cat did kill one of the last birds seen, a few more specimens were obtained in the following years, by which time the island also hosted numerous feral cats, and the island was only the last refuge of the bird, which had become extinct on the mainland many centuries earlier due to Polynesian rat predation. Conservation Today, the best known resident of Stephens Island is the tuatara. The island is a sanctuary for this rare order of reptile which is now extinct on the mainland, except in tightly controlled reserves including ecological islands. Stephens Island is internationally important for nature conservation. While most attention has focused on the tuatara, the significant and unique factors include: Endemic species – those found nowhere else, either because they evolved here or because they have become extinct everywhere else – such as Hamilton's Frog, perhaps the rarest frog in the world and the Ngaio Weevil, a large flightless Weevil Unusual species such as the tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus), which is the sole survivor of a group of reptiles that otherwise appears to have been extinct elsewhere in the world for more than 60 million years Rare species – such as the Stephen's Island gecko and Cook Strait click beetle that are only found in a handful of other places, and for which Stephens Island is a stronghold Common species in unusual abundance – such as the more than one million seabirds, vast numbers of wētā and darkling beetles and many more Stephens Island is a part of a complex ecosystem that includes a vast area of ocean. An enormous number of seabirds link