Also that day Gwen counted 61 New Zealand dotterels, already in their breeding stripes: ‘If we’re quiet,’ whispered Gwen, ‘we’ll see copulation.’ Among the flock at the tide was one wrybill, a fascinating little bird with its unique feature – it’s the only bird in the world that has a bill that curves sideways, to the right. There are only an estimated 5000 wrybill in New Zealand, which is to say there are only an estimated 5000 wrybill in the world.
What a magnificent day that was. I felt like I had been introduced to another kind of New Zealand – a particular New Zealand geography, another kind of New Zealand history, a different New Zealand story. Godwit, dotterel, wrybill: now I had seen them, now I had looked at them long and swooningly through my bins and Gwen’s scope, I felt changed, enriched.
For Gwen, it was just another opportunity to count. Keeping count is what birders do; numbers are their shared language. It’s a vital exercise, because it keeps track of bird populations and movements. Her particular passion, though, was fairy terns. A rare and endangered species, there are less than 40 fairy terns remaining in New Zealand. (A chick on the Kaipara Harbour would later, in the summer of 2007, be successfully fledged and ready to fly, the first such event in five years.) Gwen’s work to protect the fairy terns had won her the Queen’s Service Medal. She told me something of her dramas. There was the day a fairy tern egg was about to be washed away by the tide, but she saved the unborn chick by placing the egg in a wide-necked soup flask. There was the day she staged a sit-in at the Department of Conservation offices.
And there was the fairy tern nest she found one day on the beach at Waipu. Like most shore birds, the fairy tern lays its eggs in a scrape in the sand. That night, there was a party on the beach, a bonfire, a game of cricket… She watched on helplessly, and got up at dawn to find a line in the sand – well bowled, sir – where the nest had been. ‘I sunk to my knees and cried,’ she told me. ‘I thought, surely everyone has a right to raise a family.’ Dear Gwen. Of course I knew she would be happy when I told her my news.
Caspian Tern chick, four days old
Little wing
BY NOW IT ought to be blaringly obvious – apologies for the coyness – what I have been getting at with so many hints, so much moist sentimental clucking, about something amazing that happened along the way during my year of birds. Emily phoned one morning while I was at my desk. I work from home. She had unexpected news. I said, ‘Just come over!’ I sat out on the back porch waiting for her. It was a warm, bright winter’s day. I wept with happiness and smoked my head off. Emily arrived. She trembled with happiness. There was sunlight on her face. She said, ‘Get that smoke away from me! I’m carrying our baby.’
Our baby. A new life, someone else, someone we hadn’t planned, someone we wanted, and immediately, giddily, cherished. I thought: I love you, whoever you are. For the first time in my life I felt set free. I imagined our baby, and thought: you are my life. Please, take as much as you want.
Emily – suddenly, she was the mother of my child – went back to work. Dazed and amazed, suddenly fiercely protective, I wandered down to the bay. There were those other parents-in-waiting, the pair of white-faced herons – up to five pale blue-green eggs would hatch in the spring. On that winter’s day, at high tide, they were in lazy flight, their long, supple necks tucked close to their chest. There were six pied shags and one little shag on the pier. It was true about the pied shags, that they dive underwater for 25 to 30 seconds, and rest for no longer than ten seconds before their next fishing trip.
Back home, sitting at my desk, I gazed at the silvereyes scoffing every morsel of fruit on the guava tree outside my window. At head-height in the fork of a thin tree a few houses up the road, I found a thick nest, like a cup, very tightly made from twigs and dry grass – quite likely a goldfinch or chaffinch, which sometimes also raided the guavas.
Birds, everywhere, scattered all around, the air full of feathers and cries, a new kind of New Zealand emerging in front of my eyes as I wandered through the first tender and ecstatic days of Emily’s news. I looked at the red, hard, almost reptilian feet of the red-billed gull; heard the blackbirds break their autumnal silence and begin to sing in late July; went to the zoo and was terribly pleased with myself for being able to identify non-captive yellowhammers eating the hayseeds thrown about by Fudge, the neutered hippo (and even more excited to notice that welcome swallows had moved in, and built a nest beneath a footbridge); and followed a flock of spur-winged plovers one afternoon across a damp field near the harbour bridge,
