Could you be a bit more specific? Yes, in time. 2006 became my year of birds. I took down names. I saw birds I never knew existed. I became fascinated with birds that no longer existed, and with the literature of birds, with the social history of watching birds in New Zealand. I learned things. I shared pleasures. I saw another New Zealand, a particular geography where its borders and centres were defined by birds – a feathered New Zealand. And I saw another kind of New Zealander, their lives transformed, consumed, by birds.
I loved seeing what they had seen, that year, and years before. I loved discovering a simple truth: to watch a bird is to see the world in a completely different way.
I watched the birds – ‘Beside us,’ as poet Matthew Arnold wrote, ‘but alone’ – and I watched the watchers. I watched the world of New Zealand with refreshed eyes. It was a great privilege. I felt alert, awed, alive. And it was strange timing the way that marvellous year coincided with something else in my life, something amazing, that happened along the way.
Gannet on the nest, Waiheke, 2.10.46
An early bird
BIRDS ARE SO obvious, and so apart. They have their own New Zealand. We all know about the famous roosts – the gannet colonies at Muriwai and Cape Kidnappers, the albatrosses and penguins in Dunedin, the muttonbirds in Foveaux Strait. We care about the continued presence of our emblematic birds such as the kiwi and the kakapo lurking in the bush. It’s a very good thing to go to sleep in our houses with the familiar sound of the morepork hooting through the night. For years, my favourite bird-watching spot in the whole country was where I could see the 40 or so pairs of little shags that nested in a stand of trees above a pond by the kiosk in Christchurch’s Hagley Park from June through to January.
Lovely. But this is the notion of birds fitting in with the rest of us – birds lucky enough to be left to their own devices, survivors of modern, peopled life. Most of us think of birds as something in the background. They flit and they pace, they nest and they sing, bystanders of the air, second-class citizens, largely unnoticed. They may as well be grass.
One afternoon in February, I bowled along to the hall of birds at the Auckland Museum. Replica of a moa here, replica of a likewise extinct and distinctly ponderous New Zealand giant penguin there. All well and good, most interesting, but what made it shattering was that my visit to the museum was the first time I learned a simple fact which I assume so many schoolchildren have learned: that New Zealand, uniquely, spectacularly, was birdland. Until the arrival of humans, birds had the run of the place. They were here when the New Zealand archipelago set itself loose from Gondwanaland about 80 million years ago. The theory is that the moa and the kiwi, our famous ratites, flightless birds, just stood there as the land separated. Cutely, the theory’s known as Moa’s Ark – New Zealand was a cargo ship, and the ratites went along for the ride.
More birds arrived, by wing and wind, and it appears likely that most of our native species, such as the tui, are actually ancient Australians. Since when – 40 million years ago? Twenty million? Is it possible the kiwi also flew from Australia, and then adapted to life in New Zealand as a flightless ground predator?
Birds are small-boned; the fossil record is lousy. I suspect the lack of evidence acts as a balm to Don Hadden, a former teacher at the Christian school Middleton Grange in Christchurch, and one of our most knowledgeable bird photographers. His book 99 New Zealand Birds quotes Genesis: ‘God created … every winged bird according to its kind.’
Middleton Grange goes in for the nonsense of a young Earth created by God only 8000 years ago. The rest of us can thank birds for explaining the way the world really works: the light bulb of the theory of evolution that first flashed over Darwin’s head was courtesy of his study of Galapagos Island finches. There is an exhilarating passage in his book Journal of the Beagle, written long before he came up with the single greatest idea ever to occur to the human mind, where he muses on the different beak structure of 13 finches: ‘Seeing this … diversity in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.’
The glint of that light bulb over his head came as Darwin sailed on the Beagle towards New Zealand. He spent the Christmas of 1835 here. He hated it, couldn’t wait to leave. Q: What do you think of New Zealand, Mr Darwin? A: Rubbish. But he had unknowingly set foot on one of the world’s great natural laboratories. In 1839, Richard Owen, an English biologist and one
