There are over a million pairs of fairy prions around New Zealand waters. They lay only one egg in season, in a burrow in the ground, where the eggs and chicks are hopelessly vulnerable to cats and rats – and also, on Stephens Island, to tuatara. All I really knew, though, was how tiny it was, this grey sea bird with a twisted bill and blue legs, all of it quite dead, inside a plastic shopping bag from Foodtown on a table in a croquet club-room in Papakura. It had felt hollowed out in my hand, almost weightless, as though it only contained sea salt and sea air.
I chatted to Ian Southey that night. A few days later he invited me out birding on the Kaipara Harbour; he picked me up one Sunday for a long and rewarding day on possibly the bleakest stretch of inland tide in the country. Fit and somewhere in his thirties, he advertised he meant business as soon as he parked the car, stripping down to a pair of shorts and bare feet, even though it was a cold winter’s day, raked by a sea breeze.
Ian’s list of species he had seen in his life was about 230; he didn’t keep count, it wasn’t his thing. He was a serious student of birds – that year he worked on the dunlin, and would later post an email on the popular BIRDING-NZ internet newsgroup, excitedly describing his Department of Conservation survey work on forest yellowheads in Otago’s Dart River: ‘You should be here!’
He brought along a spare scope to our day on the Kaipara, and we trudged for hours along a black damp tundra, stopping here and there to inspect and to count: 161 SIPOs, 125 bar-tailed godwits, 71 New Zealand dotterels, 61 banded dotterels, plus two species of Arctic breeders, probably juveniles, wintering in New Zealand – 25 orange-legged turnstones, and 541 knots.
The day included a rare find. Ian picked out the terek sandpiper, a voracious feeder with its delicately upturned bill. I smiled to see this scarce visitor to our shores, because I had just finished reading Mark Obascik’s modern classic The Big Year, his captivating account of three US twitchers who fiercely competed to find the most species in North America in 1998. Towards the end of that year, the numbers were close. New Jersey industrial contractor Sandy Komino was on 703, retired chemical company executive Al Levantin had 663, and the dark horse, Greg Miller, a lonely, divorced, broke, overweight nuclear-power worker from Maryland, could count 658. Obascik: ‘After a four-day, 6500-mile sweep of the Pacific Northwest, Komino returned home to a jarring phone call. Turn around right now and come back, the caller told him. There’s a terek sandpiper working the surf in Anchorage.’ Naturally, Komino did as he was told.
All that, just for one bird which fed its greedy face along the tideline on an unremarkable winter’s day in the Kaipara Harbour, the distant tide holding its breath, the vast gloopy softness of mud-flats, at another end of the world.
A hen Bellbird, Little Barrier, 25.2.48
Birdland
THE AIR WAS full of feathers and cries – all across the country. I began writing about birds in my weekly column in Sunday, and then asked readers what they had seen, and when, and where. They responded at length. The word count of emails added up to over 13,000, half the size of this book. A dozen or so readers also sent in those things written in pen and delivered in a stamped, if I have the word correctly, envelope. They came from south, north, east, west and Hamilton. They came from farmers, sailors, poets, politicians, pests, hippies, lawyers, scientists and exiled fans of Tottenham Hotspur. I was very grateful. I read every word. They gave the pleasing illusion that 800 years after the first humans arrived, New Zealand was once again restored to its original state – birdland.
The findings? Birds mattered. Birds were important, vital, emblematic of an essential New Zealand happiness. Birds were right out in front, and the correspondents reported from a distance, in the background, fascinated and observant: the sorrows and joys of so many casual naturalists, compiling a record of bird life in New Zealand in 2006.
Some of it was useful. Glenda of Kawhia reported that in the past five years the population of royal spoonbills had increased from three to 25, and this year the harbour had also seen the first arrival of two white herons. Dianne of Whenuapai counted 27 sulphur-crested cockatoos (possibly the descendants of flocks reported in the late 1960s in Waingaro, or of a flock once smuggled into Port Levy and released from a ship) in a stand of trees in May, as well as two kookaburras – quite certainly the descendants of that strange nineteenth-century experiment when George Grey, New Zealand’s two-time governor, transported wallabies and Australian birds to his home on Kawau Island.
Joan had sightings of Barbary doves on the lawn of the Philosophical Society in Orewa. Brian knew when 90 percent of the world’s population of wrybills spend the high tide on the roof at Tranzrail’s Otahuhu marshalling yards. Julia had a black fantail – the first she’d ever seen in many years of bush walking – flit from her shoulder to her head in a garden in Marlborough.
Corrine summoned the ghost of Major Geoffrey Buddle when she wrote of taking her elderly mother to the top of Sanatorium Hill in Cambridge every year from late August to late September, when tui (highest count, 19) come for the nectar of Prunus campanulata, or Taiwan cherry tree: the hill is named after the old TB sanatorium where Buddle made his recovery from gas poisoning in World War I. It was good to think of native birds gorging themselves on the spot where that old soldier
