The men were issued with full army kit, but dressed as civilians. If captured, they were to say they were fishermen. Their job? To keep an eye on enemy shipping. They didn’t see any. There wasn’t any. But in between his daily inspections of the flat, undisturbed horizon at 6 a.m., midday and 6 p.m., Turbott kept himself busy. He read War and Peace, three times over, and took advantage of that rare opportunity to take detailed notes of sea birds such as the Arctic tern and the southern skua.
Island life was cold, it was barren, it was strictly for the birds. Turbott enjoyed that year just fine. Very little seemed to perturb him. He was a lovely man, kind and considerate, and he had a very sly sense of humour. Also, and this is a quality that really only few old people possess, he was wise. There was something about him – maybe it was his sense of equilibrium.
I asked him about the birds of his childhood, and he staggered me by quoting from one of my columns in Sunday magazine. I’d written: ‘Bravo to the protected species huddling on sanctuaries and islands. But most of us live at home … I am in love with the birds around us.’ Turbott said, ‘You made an important point – “most of us live at home”. We don’t go to Little Barrier or Fiordland and so on. The birds we have in New Zealand are partly the introduced species, and partly the natives. The natives are very much divided into those that adapted and live all around us, and those that took a bombshell after colonisation.
‘The answer to your question is that in our Stanley Bay garden we had blackbirds, thrushes, silvereyes, finches, fantail, grey warbler, and kingfisher. They were the birds all around us. And they’re marvellous birds. I’m all for blackbirds. Most successful bird in the world, really. Ecologically, it’s perhaps the most important. It’s everywhere: it’s the one that’s eating the insect pests in the garden, and the fields. In its own right it’s a handsome bird, and that’s partly why I was keen to go to Oxford – in my earlier days, the British Council offered me a trip for six months to the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology – to see what the British made of their own birds.
‘It varies in New Zealand as to which birds have survived under which circumstances. Some native birds have penetrated into the exotic forests – whitehead and robin are common. We have a give and take going on. The whole thing’s a dynamic, because we’re getting birds from Australia – the spur-winged plover, the swallow.’
I mentioned to him that he had seen only the second recorded welcome swallow in New Zealand, in 1941 on the Cape Expedition. He said, ‘A lot of species are new since I was a boy. And yet kingfishers were already revelling in the colonial landscape. As Edgar Stead quite rightly said, “The coming of telephone wires was heaven for kingfishers.” He even drew the difference between copper-drawn wires and steel wires, as to which the kingfisher liked best.
‘That’s been one of my main interests, the situation as the landscape changes. New Zealanders could do with being more relaxed in the settled landscape, which is what you were getting at in your article. There’s a growing tendency to discount any interest in anything other than the rare native birds. I don’t know whether it’s a Calvinistic reaction against the sins of our grandparents, but it’s as if you’re not allowed to speak about anything except a kakapo or a saddleback.
‘That’s getting a bit extreme. I suppose a lot of the Department of Conservation staff’s bread and butter depends on working on them. Well, fine. I would spend money on saving the last kakapo. It’s immensely demanding; Don Merton is showing what can be done with saving the black robin. We’re famous all over the world for making this effort. And yet, why not live in our landscape as it is?
‘At present – and I can say this because I’ve spent more time than most people out in the utter wilds, looking for rare birds that have survived only in the bush – it’s a matter of preserving birds if we can. That’s the new movement of controlling rats and stoats in patches of bush in places like Waitakere and Karori. If you do enough of that you can have rare native birds, even stitch bird and saddleback. But they won’t survive unless basic controls are carried out. On the whole, the birds that are survivors are the ones that maybe matter ecologically.’
Turbott had been to so many offshore islands, and now he was in a retirement village in Auckland with a view of a phoenix palm. I asked about the birds around him. He picked up his Pentax bins, looked out the window, and said, ‘There are thrush singing, fantail, grey warbler in the garden next door. Just there, there’s a blackbird in possession of that power box. He’s whitewashed the top of it. About now they’re beginning to stake out their territories, and getting quite aggressive for spring.
‘About 30 or 40 mynahs roost in that palm. Better still, for two years I’ve watched kingfishers nesting just beneath them – they get in and make a small hole so the mynahs can’t get at the chicks. Whatever helps native birds to get established is interesting.’
On my way out I lingered at the doorway. He suddenly thought of something, took off on those long, loping legs, came back and said, ‘This was Bud’s.’ He held out a relic, a great big old torch that had belonged to Major Geoffrey Buddle, DSO, MC, Serbian Eagle. Would anyone mind too much if I said that he was carrying an eternal flame?
Nesting colony of Caspian Terns on the beach at Mangawai, 21.10.40
Dear Gwen
YOU CAN TELL a lot about a person
