How to Watch a Bird

the instruments, who studies the intricacies of music theory, searching for musical perfection … until he could sit down at the piano and improvise so brilliantly that every measure of music rolling forth from the keys would be an inspiration to the listener. So it was with Peterson, only it was birds, not music. Since his boyhood he had been watching birds, painting them, photographing them, writing about them, letting his quest for birds take him to all parts of the globe; now he could hold a room full of birders spellbound simply by reminiscing, by improvising. When it was over we would all be on our feet, rocking the room with applause – but while he spoke, no one made a sound.’

There are signs that twitching is the next big thing waiting to happen in New Zealand. Right now, it’s the slowest next big thing. The record twitch so far attracted only about 20 birders – when an Australian reed warbler was at St Anne’s Lagoon near Cheviot. I asked the man who is often described by birders as ‘New Zealand’s arch twitcher’, Sav Saville of Feilding, how many serious twitchers there were here. ‘I could count them on the fingers of one hand,’ he said.

Four or five in the whole country! Twitching is a lonely business in New Zealand; the superbly named Robin Bush, who emigrated here from England (and whose bird photography is so good that OS members give him the ultimate accolade of saying he’s ‘another Geoff Moon’), talked to me about missing the camaraderie he was used to among twitchers back home.

Sav said, ‘I can guarantee it will change. I just can’t see it not happening.’ This was partly said out of self-interest. Sav has a day job: it sounds like he’s making it up, but he really is an air-force pilot. He has also created Wrybill Tours, which runs birding expeditions up and down the country. In fact, the first time I met Sav was last summer on the beach at Gisborne, when I was on my romantic East Coast trip with Emily, and saw a four-wheel drive marked WRYBILL TOURS. That car has done some considerable mileage in his quest for birds. Wrybill Tours operates pelagic tours – the Hauraki Gulf, the East Cape – in search of sea birds, as well as national tours of shore, forest and island, attracting international birders and hard-core twitchers on intense three-week trips.

As a destination, New Zealand is increasingly becoming a must-see birding hot spot, with British, European and United States birder companies raking in good money to bring twitchers our way. Sav: ‘I looked at their itineraries and what they were achieving and realised we could do it much better from here. They just didn’t know what they were talking about, really.’ He set up Wrybill Tours with birding colleague Brent Stephenson in 2003, and figured it would take five years to generate any real business. ‘But it took off like a mad thing. We made a small financial profit in the first year, and it’s just gone completely weird. Turnover is approaching $100,000 this year.’

What’s the appeal? Why come here to look at birds? You can see a greater, far more dazzling variety in other parts of the world. A fellow called Gunnar posted an email on Sav’s newsgroup BIRDING-NZ, happily twittering on about seeing 500 species on a 12-day birding trip in Peru. It drew this very New Zealand response from a subscriber: ‘Can someone please explain to me why anyone wants to see 500 bird species in 12 days? I have a big enough job finding, identifying, learning and remembering 150 Australian species in one holiday. I am totally exhausted by that number. Five hundred would be like ships passing in the night. At the end of it all would be only a dream, lost to the world of oblivion. I won’t be going to Peru – that’s for sure.’

Never mind the width, feel the quality. New Zealand has what Sav called ‘high-quality birds’. He meant the species belonging to three bird families unique to New Zealand. First, and most obvious, the kiwis. Then the wattle birds – kokako, saddleback. And then the wrens – rifleman and rock wren. Nothing like them anywhere, and we also have birds only unto New Zealand (kea, kakapo, takahe, wrybill…).

How to watch a unique bird? The groundwork is in place. There are several other birding tour companies in New Zealand, including Manu, Driftwood, Kahurangi, and Kiwi Wildlife, plus localised tours to sanctuaries at Tiritiri Matangi Island, Kapiti Island, Mount Bruce, the white heron colony at Okarito, and albatrosses at Kaikoura and Taiaroa Head. As well, Greytown in the Wairarapa has a world-class birds store and gift shop, offering some magnificent antique prints – the US$350 print by nineteenth-century illustrator Frederick Nodder of the brown kiwi, gormless and impossibly upright, has to be seen to be disbelieved.

Now living in Tabor, Iowa, New Zealand birder Ross Silcock operates birding tours back home every two years – a 30-day blitz, including Stewart Island and Chatham Island, at US$7200 a head. He knows his stuff – the last trip, in 2005, clocked 162 bird species. By email, he wrote, ‘My groups are a mixed bag. There is always a really gung-ho twitcher who wants to keep moving to the next spot, and gets upset if we miss any of the endemic birds.’

That reminded me of a story I heard from John Gale, former president of the Miranda Naturalists Trust. He picked up a Texan twitcher at Auckland airport, and drove him to Miranda. The twitcher had a sole purpose: he wanted to add a wrybill to his world list. The bird duly appeared. ‘Aha,’ said the twitcher, put a tick on his list, got John to confirm the sighting, and then showed no further interest in the wrybill. Or in any other of the thousands of birds at the shore that day. He’d seen those species in other parts of