Too awful. There was a bit of a slop in the sea that afternoon. A swell. Everyone had seen worse. But a freak wave is exactly that: freak, no warning.
It would have been fast. The two waves that hit the Kotuku would have arrived right on top of each other. A minute? Probably 30 seconds. Not enough time to do anything, to grab life-jackets, to hit the radio. The first wave rocking the boat to the side, taking on God knows how much weight of water, the second wave finishing it off.
That was at about 2.30 p.m. No one knew anything had happened until crew on the regular 5 p.m. Stewart Island ferry spotted buckets of muttonbirds floating in the water. The alarms sounded, search parties set out. It got dark. The big floodlights on the Stewart Island wharf were turned on. It didn’t rain; it pissed down. It wasn’t cold, it was freezing – for searchers out all night looking for bodies, it took them all the next day to thaw out.
Paul and Dylan Topi made the swim to Womens Island. A muttonbirder on that island had only just left for the season the day before; he could maybe have seen the Kotuku go down from his kitchen window. But there wasn’t anyone around any more to help. Topi signalled an SOS on a torch. That was picked up, but he also wrapped rags around a branch, and lit it using kerosene he found in a hut. As well, he lit a fire on the ground.
Along with Edminston, the skipper, who had made it to the beach, they were picked up by helicopter and taken to hospital in Invercargill. It was too late for Woods. He had tried to find shelter; his body was found halfway up a cliff. Six dead. Three alive. Two funerals.
Maybe there’s something in all that muttonbird oil, in its special pickle. At 73, Morrie Trow moved like a young buck, and his hair was full and thick; at 90, Harold Ashwell was as fit as any number of fiddles, his hearing unimpaired, everything in working order, and his stated aim was to go back out muttonbirding next season.
He talked about what you do once the bird is killed. ‘First, you pluck them, and then heat-wax them to get rid of all the down. We used to boil them to do that, but waxing leaves a cleaner article. The head is offal. That’s turfed. There was a time when the wings and hearts were kept, but not any more. Then you hang the bird, for at least 12 hours, and then slice it down the middle, and take its guts out, and dry-salt by hand – salting is an art in itself. You need only a fine coating of salt.
‘Birding is like any sport – it gets in the blood, and you just can’t stop. I love the islands. Everybody takes their families. We’ve taken our granddaughter when she was only ten days old. It’s a good, healthy spot. No one ever catches the cold or anything like that. It’s much warmer there than it is here. They tell us a warm current comes down from Australia and sweeps past the islands. I can believe it. At Christmas, you’d think it had snowed – all the trees flower, and there are so many white flowers that it’s like a dusting on the island.’
He said his family had been birding since 1826: ‘We’re descendants of half-castes, really.’ Originally, he said, muttonbirds were taken as food for winter for the family. And now? Oh, he didn’t know what other people did with the birds.
Trow said, ‘The demand far outstrips the supply.’ This year wasn’t a great season, he said. The birds were too skinny; when they eventually fattened up, the moon came out, and the birds stayed inside their burrows. ‘Some seasons, the birds stay so skinny that when they leave, they’re that sick and sorry, the first bit of bad weather they run into, they can’t take it. You pick them up on the beach. This year you won’t.
‘This year, millions of healthy birds will have left the island. We already know we have sent away a beautiful bunch of birds. Next season,’ he said, ‘should be a great season for muttonbirding.’
Downy Bittern chicks in the nest, Papatoetoe, 18.12.38
Rare blue chicken
TWITCHING IS THE new hunting. It’s a genuine sport, with only a vague set of rules but a clear, ruthless purpose: to find as many rare or unusual bird species as possible. It’s a genuine challenge – you have to act fast on information, and be prepared to travel a long way to an obscure patch of land. Time is limited, birds don’t sit still. Numbers are everything. Scores are marked by lists – a year list, a life list, a world list, a national list, et cetera.
It’s getting huge in Australia (a record 350 birders recently travelled vast distances to twitch a grey-headed lapwing that should have been in Thailand). It’s already huge in Britain (one of the most famous twitches in UK birding history was in 1989, when 5000 twitchers descended on a supermarket car park in Kent to see the golden-winged warbler making its first appearance in Europe). And in America it’s… very American, which is to say overblown, an epic enterprise, a whole continent to conquer, with events like the five-day Great Texas Birding Classic held in April, as well as the annual sea-to-shining-sea Big Year.
Overblown, maybe, but American twitching is high end. A former record holder, Kenn Kaufman, described attending a speech by the great American birder Roger Tory Peterson thus: ‘Listening, I realised he might have been any kind of artist. He might have been a composer, the great composer who began as a youth and learned to play all