I met Gwen on the first night I plucked up courage to attend an OS meeting. It was held in a freezing cold lecture room on the Unitec campus. A two-dollar donation at the door, 21 people in attendance, tea-bag tea and malt biscuits upstairs in the kitchen. I wrapped myself up tight in an overcoat and listened to veteran ornithologist Dick Veitch give a talk about the crisis facing red knots in America’s Delaware Bay. Yes, most interesting. Afterwards, notable bird sightings were shared. A white heron, the solitary kotuku, had been seen at the public toilets in Kaukapakapa on the Kaipara Harbour. Various other topics came up, and one voice interjected the most, opinionated and inquiring, always there with a question or a trenchant point of view. I thought: I must talk to her. This was Gwen, who became my closest birding friend.
After we had chatted that July night over the tea and the malt biscuits, she picked me up outside my flat three days later, and I spent an exhilarating afternoon with her among the wading birds on Omaha Spit. Her first words were: ‘Aha. Got your bins. Good.’ I learned quickly that birders were tremendously single-minded. They didn’t waste time with talk of other things; life was something that flitted in the background: they had eyes only for birds. Phil Hammond, one of New Zealand’s few bona fide twitchers – birders actively and passionately engaged in sighting rare birds – told me once about tromping across Waikato farmland with two other twitchers in pursuit of the rare dunlin. One of the men had just had a successful triple bypass. ‘Funny thing was,’ Phil said, ‘no one even mentioned it…’
Which is not to say that getting Gwen to talk about things other than birds was as hard as pulling teeth. Yes, yes, a deliberate metaphor: she works as a school dental technician. She had joined OS 30 years earlier, in 1976, wanting something to keep her mind and body fit. Other birders could certainly vouch for the latter: back then, as a younger woman with a most pleasing figure, she had caused something of a scandal when she showed up at beach expeditions wearing a bikini.
She made endemic birds her study, until, she said, something happened in the late 1980s: ‘I saw the light!’ Gwen became a ‘wader’, fascinated by and in thrall to New Zealand’s migratory wading birds. Among our birders, waders are a kind of cult – possibly the most fervent of our modern ornithologists, followers of the true path. In part, it’s an Auckland thing. The city has two harbours and is nearby to a third, the giant Kaipara, all of which attracts vast numbers of wading birds. Actually, the birds turn up all over the shop, at coasts and tidal estuaries in both the North and South Islands.
These migratory wading species have a special status. I deliberately left them out of the pecking order of New Zealand birds earlier, because they occupy such a distinct niche. New Zealand is a littoral nation – littoral, meaning shores. We are the land of the long white coast. Our shell banks, mud-flats, dunes, and above all our shuffling tides are ideal for a remarkable variety of wading birds. One of the great sights of bird-watching is huge flocks of wading birds mobbed together as they wait for the high tide to shuffle out.
Most wading birds are attractive, with their long legs and long bills. The pied stilt is probably the most graceful of all, the Kate Moss of birds, thin as pins and light as… well, feathers. But there is much more to wading birds than their looks. There is the fact of their migrations. Most birds are stuck here, day in, day out, but migrating waders have a romance about them, an emotional upheaval.
A few species migrate within New Zealand – such as wrybill, which take about six, seven hours to fly up from their Canterbury breeding spots to spend the summer in Auckland. Many other species are international, making epic journeys from the desolate Arctic tundras each season to winter in New Zealand. In her famous 1937 novel The Godwits Fly, Robin Hyde saw New Zealanders as godwits who ‘must make the long migration, under a compulsion they hardly understand; or else be dissatisfied all their lives long’. Really? It’s always absurd to talk of birds as humans, but the worst conceit of that observation is the ‘compulsion they barely understand’. Godwits understand it quite well. It’s a matter of life and death. Also, Hyde refers only to godwits leaving New Zealand. The fact is, godwits always return. They choose to come here.
On that cold day in July, Gwen led me across the dunes at Omaha. She stopped now and then to roll up a cigarette; no wonder we hung out together – she was the only birder I met who smoked. It began to rain, a stiff wind rose up, but Gwen was in bright spirits. It was the school holidays, and this was a precious chance for her to get out during the week. Soon, she had found what I wanted to see. That afternoon was the first time I ever laid eyes on a godwit.
Six of them, juveniles, content to stay in New Zealand over winter, long-legged, plump, and probing their long, sensitive bills into the tide line. Next autumn they might leave New Zealand on the mass, epic migration. They were
