Sib first saw Miranda in 1941, first saw the amazing sight of bar-tailed godwits, wrybills, oystercatchers and other waders parading on the shell bank. He bicycled from Auckland. Later trips were made with Ross McKenzie, who drove despite losing a leg in the First World War and suffering badly from shell shock. The author note in McKenzie’s 1972 book In Search of Birds in New Zealand reads: ‘After graduating from the bird-nesting of his early years, Ross McKenzie did a little game-bird shooting before going to France in 1916 in search of bigger game. He barely survived.’
Together, Sib and Ross inspired a generation of birders. One was Beth Brown, the first person to raise the notion of building some kind of lodge at Miranda. Stuart Chambers, in The Story of the Miranda Naturalists’ Trust, writes that the idea came to her on a summer’s day in 1973 ‘with an immense tide which brought in the birds and held them for ages’.
The idea spread. A trust was formed, funds raised. Richard Adams, the British author of the best-selling novel Watership Down, donated the proceeds of a public lecture; his book had been based on the research findings of trust member Ronald Lockley, related in his not-at-all-best-selling publication The Private Life of the Rabbit. The trust made good money from Adams’ talk. When the novelist returned a few years later they repeated the exercise but it was a flop – door takings were only $93, minus $27.50 for expenses.
Efforts continued. The centre was finally opened in September 1990. It is now firmly established as a mecca for local and international birders. The birds ignore it all and just keep arriving. Thousands of Arctic waders return from Alaska and Siberia every spring. Knots, turnstones, plovers, sandpipers and, most famously, the bar-tailed godwits romp through the mudflats alongside less-travelled birds such as black-billed gulls, dotterels, wrybills and royal spoonbills. It’s one of New Zealand’s greatest sights.
The pleasure is all Keith Woodley’s, day in, day out. ‘I’ve succumbed to the passion that besets people who spend too much time around shorebirds,’ he said. ‘It just grabs hold of you and won’t let go.’
It irks him that the local council has put up a road sign that reads SEABIRD COAST. He went with a colleague to ask them to change it to SHOREBIRD COAST. Keith, who has an abiding interest in military history, said, ‘We were repulsed with heavy losses.’ He added, ‘They thought we were being pedantic, of all things.’
He has lived for the past 16 years in a cottage beside the centre, a kind of artist in residence. On a table in the cottage he paints gentle, careful watercolours of birds. He won’t have a TV in the house. His CD collection includes Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zandt – he had arranged a lift to Auckland that week to see Steve Earle in concert. He was born in Invercargill, studied politics and history at Victoria. He said, ‘I may have reached the northern limit of my range.’
Actually, he travelled north of almost no north in 2008, when he flew to Alaska and camped out for twelve weeks to study the same bar-tailed godwits that roost at Miranda every spring and summer. His book about the epic migration is called Godwits: Long-haul Champions.
I visited him at the cottage on a Friday night. We ate fish and chips, and he talked about camping out on the Alaskan tundra and seeing the first godwit arrive on May 6. ‘A single male came in at about five-thirty in the evening. That was a big moment for me – watching a godwit arrive over its breeding ground, having come all the way probably from New Zealand.’ Winter snow and ice gradually cleared and countless flocks of birds began arriving. Keith talked about the flattened tundra landscape, its mosaic of lichens and cranberries, its sedge meadows, the huge swathes of bleached logs carried down the Yukon River.
Sooner or later all birdwatchers catch hold of a sentence that sounds as if they’re talking in their sleep. When Keith spoke of a research trip he took to Europe on the way home from Alaska, he said, ‘I went to Vienna specifically to see a godwit that had been dead for 204 years.’
The bright light, the shell banks as glaring as snow, the pale misty view of the Coromandel ranges over the water, the wide estuarine tide mooching in and out over the mud… Were any creatures moving, apart from birds? Kingfishers perched on flame trees surrounding the cemetery. Miranda holds the promise of a long life: Betty Wills died at 91, Una Harris at 92, Janet Frederick at 93, Sylvia Graham at 94. There was another suggestion that Miranda existed as a kind of wonderland: one gravestone was marked LEWIS CARROLL.
Miranda used to have a post office, a school and a cheese factory. It still has hot pools and a holiday park. There is a stall in front of an organic orchard. ‘This place used to be littered with orchards,’ Annie Wilson said. ‘I’m the last one.’ She talked about returning to New Zealand after living in Seattle for fifteen years. ‘It was a terrific culture shock,’ she said. ‘My work in this world is to convert all the dairy farmers in New Zealand to organics before they completely destroy the soil and the rivers. It’s dirty dairying
