Each man wrote one book. Stead’s The Life Histories of New Zealand Birds (1932), Buddle’s Bird Secrets (1951) and Wilson’s Bird Islands of New Zealand (1959) are all beautifully produced volumes, relics of another age. All three men were monied, men of leisure, and absolutely dedicated in the pursuit of knowledge of New Zealand birds. Together, in pairs or the three of them, they travelled the country, often to remote offshore islands, on bird study expeditions; how strange to think of them charging around some of the most obscure corners of New Zealand to look at birds at a time when all the anxious intellectual blather was about finding a ‘national identity’. They found it in the air, and had tremendous fun doing it.
They were also very good shots, especially Stead. He ordered 50,000 shotgun cartridges every year from England until his death in 1949. It’s doubtful he wasted much ammunition. Once, in Raetihi, he flushed then shot 16 quail without a miss, with rights and lefts, sometimes taking the right barrel one side of a manuka bush and the left barrel the other side. The gentleman naturalist with a smoking gun: as further evidence of his station in life, he served as president of the Christchurch bridge club, and was a world authority on rhododendrons.
Major Wilson allows that his close friend could be ‘overbearing’. Stead’s book takes Buller to task (correctly) on a point of shag behaviour, and lambasts ‘irresponsible hoodlums’ who shot terns and gulls at the mouth of the Rakaia in the early 1900s. As well, it’s a marvellous record of 18 bird species, and Stead was a good photographer of birds, too – the best is his amazing shot of a ‘slaughter yard’, showing the remains of over 150 mottled petrels, butchered by those homicidal sea birds, the southern skua.
Life in New Zealand is given to eccentricities. At first glance, it seems supremely eccentric that two army majors – Buddle of Auckland and Wilson of Bulls – were at the forefront of New Zealand ornithology, but there was depth and sadness to their calling. The two galloping majors were both awarded the Distinguished Service Order in World War I. Wilson served in the Royal Garrison Artillery, and was transferred to the New Zealand Expeditionary Force; he was wounded in 1918, and later shipped back home, to Bulls. A photograph of Wilson in full military dress shows him staring out from a pair of firm, steady eyes. He looks like a tough nut. Buddle’s photograph captures a sensitivity, but he was undoubtedly brave. He lived through the hell of Gallipoli. His DSO was awarded for bridge-building under fire, and he also won the Military Cross.
Educated at Auckland Grammar, Buddle was seriously gassed in France and not expected to live. He was packed off to a sanatorium in Scotland. That didn’t take, and he journeyed back as an invalid to New Zealand. He stopped over in Suva, where his health picked up with rest and a lot of sunbathing. Further treatment came as a patient at the old TB hospital in Cambridge.
Were birds the final cure? There seemed something precious, even life-saving, about that bond. I heard mention of a brief, unhappy marriage in Scotland. Later, back in New Zealand, he fell in love, but the woman’s father made marriage impossible. I thought of Buddle on his bird expeditions with his married friends Stead and Wilson, and was once again reminded of Matthew Arnold’s line about birds: ‘Beside us, but alone.’ I doubt I am imagining that Buddle’s photographs in his book Bird Secrets have a strange beauty to them, a peculiar peacefulness.
Wilson’s Bird Islands of New Zealand is the saddest book ever written in New Zealand ornithological literature. From his introduction: ‘It has been written in memory of my two companions on these island trips, Edgar Stead and Major Geoffrey Buddle, DSO, MC, Serbian Eagle.’ Of his relationship with the two men, he self-effaces: ‘In both cases I was the henchman.’ He adds: ‘Since their deaths I have reluctantly ceased my bird trips.’
This elegiac tone continues throughout the book, an evocative account of expeditions to islands including the Poor Knights, Hen and Chickens, Stewart, and the various Muttonbird islands. Wilson’s chief subject is sea birds – the petrels, shearwaters and prions. He has such an inquiring mind, such a good pair of eyes and ears. It’s first-class fieldwork, and some of the best travel writing about New Zealand you’ll ever read.
What a singular book. Birds, everywhere; but in the background, quiet, constant, a warm presence, are the figures of Stead and Buddle. Their ‘henchman’ has written a love story.
Young Morepork, Great King, 2.12.45
An old rooster
STEAD, BUDDLE, WILSON: I was too late for these legends, they had flown the coop, but I took a cab on a warm afternoon in March to snare a living legend in his Titirangi nest. Everyone in New Zealand ornithology knows of Geoff Moon. He is very likely the best bird photographer this country has ever produced. I already owned a copy of his first book, the stunning Focus on New Zealand Birds, published in 1957. When I noticed in the bookstores a new book under his name, with the rather familiar title New Zealand Birds in Focus, I figured it was perhaps his son. It couldn’t be the same bloke, I reasoned. Not after 50 years. But the author of 2006 was the one and the same author of 1957, now a slender, quite hilarious old rooster who was about to turn 91.
His laugh was a loud and immensely cheerful hoot: ‘Hah!’ He had a very generous head of hair. His eyes were sharp. He migrated from England in 1947; his mating habits have produced four children; he said, ‘I love the sea. And plants. And the bush. And insects…’
Above all, he loved
