Eventually the room stopped moving and the door opened - everything was quiet and outside I was all alone in a world I had never seen before.
This alien abduction is how Professor Doug Armstrong - in his talk in Whanganui - described what it would feel like if you were an endangered bird being captured, tested for diseases and sampled for DNA before being released into unfamiliar country. The birds find this very stressful.
The professor has been working for 25 years at reducing this stress as much as possible and also trying to ensure that the disorientation of the bird results in it being re-established in an old habitat.
We live in one of the most dynamic countries on Earth - the movement of Ruaumoko in the womb of Papa just over a week ago moved the Earth under our feet and the organisms living in these islands are also dynamic. If we could transport ourselves back two millennia, we would find almost no mammals living in Aotearoa.
Opinions differ as to the time of arrival of the first humans but, beyond dispute, is that people brought a variety of other animals. These may have been deliberately introduced, such as pigs and sheep, or stowaways - such as ship rats - in ocean-going craft.
Each introduction has affected, usually adversely, the indigenous flora and fauna. The two species to have done most damage to native birdlife are the rat and the stoat.
Professor Armstrong explained the meaning of several terms.
Reintroduction brings back a species to an area where it existed but has gone extinct. Reinforcement means putting more of a species into an area that has a decreasing population. Both operations involve translocation, meaning capturing a number of birds and moving them to a different area, and this is what Professor Armstrong is involved with.
He also mentioned introduction. This is releasing birds into an area where they have never existed. This is something he does not do.
The public face of reintroduction and translocation often involves schoolchildren - television images of children releasing birds into the wild. This is a very tiny part of the process and causes Professor Armstrong some concern because, although it is good to involve children, it masks the amount of work done before release.
Before this photogenic moment, there will be years of study of habitats, captive breeding, eradication of predators and research. It particularly does not mention the mountain of tedious (but very necessary) paperwork.
Between 1863 and 2012 there were over 1100 translocations of native bird species. Up until the 1960s, activity was sporadic and unco-ordinated giving low success rates, but since then activity has increased by several orders of magnitude.
A kick-start can be traced to a conference in 1993, bringing together people engaged in reintroduction projects, at which Dr Melody Serena (Australian Platypus Conservancy) coined the term "reintroduction biology".
Importantly, as well as reintroductions per year rapidly increasing, the success rate has risen significantly.
Professor Armstrong mentioned a number of projects - the kakapo, a flagship project; the black robin which, at one time, had only one breeding female but has now increased to several hundred birds; the translocation of hihi from Tiritiri Matangi Island in the Hauraki Gulf to our own Bushy Park.
Research continues into the best ways to rebuild populations. It is certain that each species has different needs, and it is not as simple as removing the predators.
An area may be predator-free but changes in the underlying eco-system can be significant in survival rates. This may be a specific insect or plant that has vanished and may itself need reintroduction before the eco-system becomes self-supporting.
We are lucky that in New Zealand this sort of work has public funding, which is not the case everywhere in the world.
■Frank Gibson is a semi-retired teacher of mathematics and physics who has lived in the Whanganui region since 1989.
