There were more outings with Gwen, to that most alluring hotspot for a birder: a sewage pond. Lagoons and shell banks had been restored to the 500 hectares of dewatered sludge at the former oxidation ponds at Mangere, and were a haven for shore birds and waterfowl. We saw juvenile bar-tailed godwits, already showing a lovely red tint to their bodies in preparation for the breeding season. There were SIPOs and New Zealand dotterels.
‘Look,’ said Gwen, ‘a scarf of wrybill.’ She pointed out a flock of about 140 birds coming into land – wrybill really do fly in the shape of a scarf flung in the air. There were pied stilts. ‘Look,’ said Gwen, and among the flock of pied stilt at the water’s edge, she picked out a solitary black stilt. The rare black stilt. There are only about 70 left in New Zealand, making it one of the most threatened shore birds in the world, according to British-based BirdLife International.
And there were what I had hoped to see at the ponds – royal spoonbill, one of the most striking birds in New Zealand, graceful with its long black legs, its snow-white, radiant plumage, and the way it flies with its neck stuck out, but made preposterous with that great big ungainly spoon sticking out of its face. It’s another modern self-introduced Australian bird, and began breeding here in 1947. There was a flock of 72 at Mangere. They waited for the tide to recede, until, one by one, they stalked into the water and spent a good 20 minutes bathing before feeding. It was moulting season; you could see a bloody red where the feathers were coming through. Most stood on the shell bank in classic wader pose, on one leg, but a few sat, folding their legs beneath them like a bundle of sticks.
Gwen and I sat watching the spoonbills nearby, nibbling at sandwiches and drinking thermos coffee provided by John Simmons, an OS member who had also come along for the day. John was 72 and another English birder; he had emigrated here with the wife and kids after giving up his job as a fireman with the Hertfordshire brigade. He said, ‘They were mad down at the fire station. They said, “What are you going to do in New Zealand?” I said, “Milk at four cents a pint, I could live on rice puddings till I get myself sorted.” But it turned out fine.’
After his wife passed away 12 years ago, he took up an interest in birds – in part, inspired by reading something in a book called The Young Pathfinders Book of Birds. When I phoned him later and asked him about the book, he said, ‘I’m looking at it right now. Here we go: “Many birds eat particular foods, and go about their food-gathering in unusual ways. The chicken-sized kiwi of New Zealand delights in perhaps the strangest food of all. The kiwi loves to gobble a certain long phosphorescent worm. It doesn’t seem to mind that the worm, 12 to 20 inches long, makes its whole bill glow like a light bulb. For a long while after the meal, until all the effects of the worm wear off, the kiwi’s bill keeps glowing.” The first time I read that I thought, that’s going a bit far.’
John and Gwen shared the kind of dialogue only birders can speak. Example: ‘Brian was asking me about the state of a spoonbill in my freezer.’ They could perform endless varieties of these dead-bird sketches: John served as the Auckland OS beach patrol coordinator, in charge of volunteers who devoted one Saturday each month to combing 30-kilometre stretches of Muriwai Beach in search of storm-cast sea birds washed up on the shore. Six mottled petrels in March, 17 little blue penguins in August and another 15 the following May, 19 fairy prions in July. The death toll could sound enigmatic, like a line of verse separated from its poem:
10 sooty shearwaters in June.
Beach patrolling is crucial to OS work. Every year, thousands of dead sea birds fetch up on New Zealand beaches, providing the raw material, so to speak, for an understanding of migration. The beach patrols also allow particular study of population, age, anatomy, moult and feeding. It’s a sub-genre of ornithology – how to watch a dead bird. Between 1943 and 1987, patrollers found 209,204 dead sea birds on the New Zealand coastline, as well as dead other things. John: ‘Found a dead horse once. A month later, a dead deer. Three sheep’s heads.’
Recent rare-bird finds included the brown-phased Oriental cuckoo from New Guinea, and the northern giant petrel, whose leg band traced it back to South Africa’s Cape Town University, where the bird had been banded in 1984, making it at least 22 years old. John made sure every collected bird was properly, tightly Gladwrapped, then triple-bagged, and he took along two three-litre containers of hot water, plus detergent and hand towels. ‘Some of the birds,’ he said, ‘are long past their use-by date.’
I can vouch that a dead sea bird stinks to a high, musky hell. One night, when Gwen drove me out to the South Auckland OS meeting at the croquet club-rooms, someone brought along a fairy prion. Its blue-black bill was at right angles, the top pointing left, the bottom pointing right, and a most interesting discussion ensued as to whether this was a freak mutation, or a car had run over it. Later, as a university research student gave a talk on the perplexing rate of breeding failure among the little blue penguin on Tiritiri Matangi Island, my mind kept wandering
