At the far edge of the Pacific, a nation that has long measured its soul in birdsong now faces a reckoning with a virus that has reshaped ecosystems across the globe. New Zealand, the last major inhabited landmass to encounter H5N1, is racing to vaccinate 300 breeding pairs of critically endangered native birds—creatures found nowhere else on Earth—before the outbreak that has already devastated wildlife on every other continent reaches its most vulnerable sanctuaries. The effort is as much an act of cultural preservation as it is of conservation, for in these islands, the birds are not merely