This is what makes true twitchers such rogues within the birding community – they’re a rebel sect, wanting only to add to their precious, obsessive count. Not for these fellows – they’re almost always men – the careful ornithological study, the useful activity (banding, beach patrols), the conservation effort. Those activities are strictly for the birders. And yet most birders are also closet twitchers. That day I was at Tupora in the Kaipara Harbour with Ian Southey, unseen by either of us responsible birder Phil Hammond was there too, guiltily relying on a tape recording of a fernbird to attract that secretive wetland bird his way. It worked, and the next weekend he was on an island in the Far North, twitching the nankeen kestrel, an uncommon Australian vagrant.
Wrybill Tours are keeping a record of birders with highest life lists of New Zealand species. Sav has 232 species, his wrybill partner Brent Stephenson 237. High scores were also reached by twitchers from other lands – Britain, Australia, the United States, South Africa, Canada, Germany, Holland. In second place, on 261: Colin Miskelly of the Department of Conservation. Top of the table: former Wildlife Service ranger and veteran OS regional representative, Brian Bell, who has 263 species.
When I spoke to Sav in August, he was making confident noises about being the first birder to score 200 in his year list. In the end, he was beaten by Stephenson, who counted 206, the last being a kookaburra in the Leigh Marine Reserve car park.
Well, you know what they say about records: they’re there to be broken, toppled, smashed. What rough beast, slouching towards the brolga (an extremely rare Australian crane), is due to launch a challenge? Will anyone rise above the 300 life list, or more than 250 in one calendar year? The sky, obviously, is the limit.
As well as the native population to count and conquer, twitchers need to keep on their toes for visiting, or vagrant, birds. Birds from Australia, or Arctic waders caught up in other flocks – the lost, the windswept, the confused, the simply curious, the passengers who have hitched a ride on container ships. (Sometimes as stowaways on aircraft: Graham Turbott and Brian Gill looked into two cases of mangled barn owls that arrived in Auckland on international flights, the first dropping from the wheels and found by schoolgirl Sharon Richardson at Flat Bush School in 1983, the second almost exactly one year later in the undercarriage of Continental Airlines Flight C01 arriving from Los Angeles via Honolulu.)
BIRDING-NZ keeps subscribers informed of rare sightings. In 2006, messages included sightings of a single white heron at the Te Marua reservoir in Upper Hutt and another at the Waiatarua Reserve in Auckland (‘Truly amazing… why aren’t people talking about this?’), an unidentified Australian crane (either sarus or brolga) circling Moetapu Bay in Marlborough Sounds, a Japanese snipe at Forest Lake in Hamilton, a black kite near Renwick in Blenheim, eight cattle egrets on a dairy farm in Foxton, a long-wintering Hudsonian godwit at Miranda, and a glossy ibis wandering from Blenheim south to Christchurch.
There was also a white ibis, that extraordinary black-headed, white-plumed bird so common as a scavenger in the city parks of Sydney, sighted at Haast. This led to a raging debate about the Department of Conservation. DOC staff, who were first to spot the rare bird, were accused, then defended, of ‘failing to disclose’ the sighting to New Zealand’s birders and twitchers. Comment from the anti-DOC side: ‘Didn’t you know that DOC has always had exclusive and confidential rights to New Zealand’s biota, and to most of its land too? It’s only when they’re short of cash … that they break out with generosity.’
And so the ibis had unwittingly provoked a question – whose bird is it anyway? – which is bound to play itself out more and more in New Zealand’s nascent twitching scene. The Department of Conservation is often viewed as the great killjoy of modern New Zealand life. The point of twitching is to go wherever there’s a chance to sight a rare bird. It’s false to say that armed combat awaits. But it’s true to say that the pro- and anti-DOC factions settled on an uneasy truce on BIRDING-NZ.
Mostly, though, twitching here is marked by typical New Zealand amiability. There’s an annual Twitchathon – teams have 24 hours, any day of the year, to rack up the highest count. The record is held by Ken Bond and Ted Wnorowski, who in 2006 sighted 100 New Zealand bird species in one day. Impressive. They covered a lot of ground. And it helped that they stayed overnight at the bird sanctuary on Tiritiri Matangi Island. This is what is known as twitching sitting ducks.
But almost every twitcher goes to Tiri. It’s a fabulous place, beautifully restored, a masterpiece of conservation and preservation, and the star attraction is that near-mythical New Zealand bird brought back from beyond the grave – the takahe. I went to Tiri on a lovely day in August, walked along tracks through spectacular native bush, and happily saw saddlebacks, stitchbirds, tui, bellbirds, fantails, kokako, North Island robins, whiteheads, red-crowned parakeets, and a pair of rare endemic brown teal, which slept in the sunshine by a pond, exactly like sitting ducks. Personal highlight? Takahe. Every New Zealander ought to see this bird. It’s our superstar, our greatest survivor. It should be as celebrated as the kiwi.
The takahe came back from the grave not once, but twice. It was a food source for Maori at the same time as the moa, but the first that Europeans even knew it existed was when moa bones were discovered. When Richard Owen at the British Museum identified the moa in 1839, it caused a sensation. New Zealand collector Walter Mantell duly sent over crates of more bones, which included a shipment of a skull, bill and other parts of a skeleton of a different and
