Of all his books, perhaps his masterpiece is the sumptuous Birds Around Us (1979). He took a quiet pride in his work, but what moved him was the subject. Moon knew that other New Zealand, a particular geography where borders and centres were defined by birds. When you looked at the photographs, you felt the photographer’s pleasure – red-crested parakeets inside a hole in a pohutakawa tree overhanging a cliff on Hen Island, welcome swallows flying to a nest under a road bridge near Hikurangi, reef herons in a cave on an islet near Kawau Island, crested grebes in a nest of sticks and water weeds on Lake Alexandra.
He did an awful lot more than take pictures. Moon’s field notes were a significant influence on the 1966 Field Guide. In more recent years, OS members have vigorously lobbied for him to be elected a Life Fellow of the society. They are right to resent the fact that their applications have so far been rejected.
Moon’s greatest work has been on moreporks and kingfishers. He captured the first photograph of a diving kingfisher showing that a protective membrane closes over its eye just as it touches water. He devoted countless hours to spying on the morepork. When it flew he heard nothing, but felt a wind on his face: ‘The wings of a morepork have this velvety edge to the flight feathers, so they fly absolutely silently.’ Once, high up in a tree at some ungodly hour waiting to get eye to eye with that night owl, he electrocuted himself on a 2500-volt charge while changing a flash bulb, ‘felt a sensation of being inflated’, and was knocked unconscious. ‘Lucky I didn’t fall off and kill myself,’ he said. ‘Hah! Oh dear.’
It was rather startling when Moon pointed to a book by the acclaimed British nature photographer Heather Angel and said, ‘She’s a real goer.’ But this was his highest form of praise. He meant she got out there, investigated, did the work.
He’s that same kind of active bird, or was – it had been two years since he last lurked inside one of his famous home-made wooden hides in the New Zealand bush. ‘It is a wonderful experience being in a hide,’ he said, with real longing. So much of his life has passed in one of these contraptions: ‘I got up to Mark 7b.’ Built from light timber frames, covered with either canvas or a sheet of calico painted to stiffen them against a breeze, the hides went with him all over New Zealand. You can see them neatly folded on the roof of his Cortina in a photo taken sometime in the 1970s in his latest book. The car is stuck in shingle near Lake Ellesmere. Moon is jacking the car up. He looks the happiest man alive.
On the afternoon I visited, he had the run of the house; his wife Lynette was visiting a grandchild in Malaysia. There were cut flowers in a vase. The carpet seemed freshly vacuumed. Dominating one wall was a framed letter and a drawing of an English dipper, sent to him by the artist Raymond Ching in 1961. I stretched out my legs and was in no hurry to leave. When he said his basement was full of Bolex 16mm films of diving gannets, I shivered with delight at the thought of a basement in Titirangi containing so much life.
I asked about his life. He was born in China. He could trace his ancestry back to a knight who served William the Conqueror. Sent to school in Essex, he explored a fabulous marshland, teeming with things such as voles and poisonous adders. He trained to be a vet, and remembers boiling a dead dog’s head on a gas ring. He was sent to the Isle of Wight during the war – the Germans dropped a bomb on a herd of cows. He liked the sound of New Zealand, and ignored a friend who wrote him a six-page letter stating reasons not to come here. He set up practice in Warkworth.
He knew all the leading names in New Zealand ornithology. There was Ken Bigwood, who pioneered bird sound recordings: ‘Very difficult man to get on with.’ There was the black-backed gull watcher and much else, Graham Turbott, now in a rest-home in Epsom: ‘Very nice fellow. Quiet chap.’ There was Dr Michael Soper: ‘Probably our best photographer of birds. Wasn’t an easy guy to get on with.’
Moon had a gentle manner. The way he moved revealed an obvious agility and strength. Above all, there was a curiosity about him, a lively intelligence. He said, ‘I hated school. Except for sport. And chemistry. And art. And physics. And geography.’ He didn’t hate school at all, except for Latin. ‘I used to daydream through a boring Latin lesson, and make plans about where I’d go wandering in the marshes. Nature was in my blood right from the start.’
When he was ten, he discovered a sparrowhawk’s nest with three chicks in a tree. Inspired by the bird photographer Oliver Pike, he built a hide near the nest. Moon writes in his latest book: ‘I entered it soon after dawn … I held my breath when the chicks started to squeak as they saw a parent arriving to feed them. I was transfixed and my heart was pounding as I watched … In spite of the extreme discomfort of sitting in the hide on a leaning branch, I spent several hours there, fascinated by the amazing spectacle I was observing at such close quarters.’
What he wanted was
