how to watch a bird
steve braunias
AWA PRESS
To Emily and Minka
Summer
IT WAS OUR first summer together. We had gone on a road trip up north over Christmas – five motels in seven nights, wet towels drying on the back seat. It was barbecue weather, New Zealand with sand in its hair, barefoot on hot pavements, undressed and dazed and unshaved, on vacation, gone fishing, fed and watered, half asleep, on good terms with itself, happy, setting off fireworks to see in the New Year.
There was an afternoon watching something spectacular – on the beach at Ruakaka, where a flock of gannets smashed into the water and came back up with fish. That was such a dazzling sight, but every day was dazzling. When I think about that week, I remember the sun high in the sky, the car strolling along on dusty roads between quiet fields of yellow short-haired grass. In the towns, fat kids stuffed themselves with ice-blocks and fizz outside dairies, and light breezes whisked dust down the middle of the street. The towns gave way to lines of gum trees peeling in the sun. You could go hours without hearing a sound in our lazy sensual isles at the end of the world.
I was in love with New Zealand and in love with Emily. Summer with Emily – that’s mainly what I remember. Emily swimming, Emily sleeping, Emily driving her passenger.
We went back to work. I don’t remember much about that. Life was with Emily at my rented apartment near a bay, with Emily at her rented apartment in the city. Late one night, I stepped out on to her balcony for a cigarette. It was towards the end of January. A summer’s evening, long past dark, the air finally cooling and only as warm as toast after the fructifying heat of daylight hours. I stood and smoked, and then a bird flew past right in front of my snoot. You could say it was any old bird – it was that common, unloved scavenger, a black-backed gull, a big quiet thing, in no apparent hurry, slowly flying past, then slowly circling back again, and its silent, sudden appearance in darkness was stranger than anything happening down below among the traffic and the street lights.
It felt like a jolt. The gull had come by so close; in the darkness its white body had glowed like a lamp swinging on a porch. No doubt it had good reason to be going about its business on an obscure hour in the middle of downtown Auckland. What business? Back then, I would have thought that God only knew, and it turned out that I was right – God had known, in an earlier summer, 1968–69 to be precise, when the roof-nesting habits of black-backed gulls in downtown Auckland were studied by Graham Turbott, a lovely man who at 92 is the godfather of New Zealand ornithology.
Turbott’s report on the gulls, published in a 1969 issue of Notornis, referred to the observation of four pairs of birds at breeding sites around the city. Two chicks were hatched from a bulky nest of grass and paper on the roof of the Old Oxford Theatre on Queen Street; one chick hatched but died on the roof of a hot-water tank on top of the Chief Post Office. Chicks were seen to depart the nest in mid January from the roof of the Magistrate’s Court in Kitchener Street. At 24 Cook Street, according to a Miss J. Walker who ‘kept a constant watch’ on the gulls’ nest in the gutter at the edge of the roof, a young bird, fully fledged at six weeks, left with both its parents on February 7; it had hatched from its manger in the gutter on Christmas Day.
The bird I saw was an adult, and probably still feeding its chick. Black-backed gulls – Larus dominicianus – nest in large colonies of up to several thousand pairs in the greater outdoors of the coast, but form solitary two-parent families in the city. They can swallow a cutlet of mutton whole. Offal is also acceptable.
The oldest recorded New Zealand black-back was a been-there, ate-that 28 years old. In its adult prime, the bird isn’t a bad looker; it has yellow eyes and a bright red smear on its bill. But it takes two moults and nearly three years before juveniles assume the smooth whiteness that glows like a lamp. Young black-backs are among the most unpleasant things on wings. A lot of people mistake these large mottled brutes for some other kind of bird, and refuse to throw them scraps, out of distaste for their appearance. No one should be in the least surprised that these plug-ugly thugs don’t get any sex until they are at least four years old.
I didn’t know any of these things when I saw the black-back brush past my nose that summer’s evening. I didn’t know nothing about any birds. But when I caught sight of that one bird, felt the jolt it gave, that white flash in the black night, I was bowled over with happiness, and I thought: birds, everywhere. Summer in New Zealand fills with so much light that we become the land of the long white page. Every corner, every margin is filled with birds.
As a weekly magazine columnist since 1999, a lot of my writing has imagined different kinds of maps of New Zealand – of the things and pleasures that are right in front of us, that tell almost a secret history of the place, that maybe even reveal an emotional truth about the place. And so I’ve written a series of columns about hot springs. About steak. About mangroves. About tearooms. About things and pleasures you can find all across the country, from one town or shore to the next, forming a grid. I now wanted very much to write about birds.
Birds of the city and town, on lawn and
