It was assumed the bird had gone the way of the moa, and was extinct. But two years later, in 1849, Mantell bought a fresh takahe skin from sealers. They had followed the trail of a large bird in the snow in Dusky Bay: ‘It ran with great speed, and upon being captured uttered loud screams, and fought and struggled violently; it was kept alive three or four days onboard the schooner and then killed, and the body roasted and ate by the crew, each partaking of the delicacy, which was declared to be delicious.’
Three more birds were caught and killed in the next few years. One ended up on Walter Buller’s desk. Graham Turbott excised the following passage, which had appeared in the original 1883 volume of Buller’s Birds, from his 1967 edition: ‘On being introduced to this rara avis I experienced once again the old calm that always came over me when gazing upon the two examples in the British Museum – the lingering representative of a race coexistent in this land with the colossal moa! Then, retiring to the library, I shut myself in with the Notornis [Southern Bird], and handled my specimen with the loving tenderness of the naturalist.’
Quite. But the supply of takahe dried up, and the bird was once again written off, left for dead – until its dramatic rediscovery in 1948 by Invercargill ear specialist, Dr Geoffrey Orbell. As a child, Orbell had seen a photograph of a stuffed takahe. His mother told him it was extinct. Perhaps it isn’t, he figured… When he tracked a takahe colony in Fiordland on 20 November 1948, Orbell – and the bird – became international celebrities, Time magazine describing the find as ‘a state of ornithological ecstasy’. The bird was here to stay. Although easy meat for predators, superb conservation and recovery work has since brought the known population to about 250.
And so there it was, in front of my eyes on a winter’s day on an island in the Hauraki Gulf, a bird whose rumoured death was twice greatly exaggerated, a bird whose existence shone with ancient history and modern miracle, now a tame kind of pet, not at all shy, an irascible picnic thief, huge and glowing and prehistoric, in full view on a grassy lawn, stalking about on two legs because that’s all it could do, with a strong red bill, a fat blue head and a fat blue body. The most prized rediscovered bird in New Zealand looked for all the world like a rare blue chicken.
A pair of Whitefronted Terns, Tiri, 9.11.36
The godwits fly
A PAIR OF SPOTTED doves roosted in a fig-tree in our back garden, and a neighbour’s pet sulphur-crested cockatoo squawked out the words, ‘Here, puss, puss, puss!’ It was on a quiet street, the rent was good, and we held hands and spoke in whispers about the happiness that was waiting to enter the spare room. From the moment Emily and I moved in together, I thought: I never want to leave. We had arrived. Our baby was due in February. It was spring, and one of the first things I did was chop down a shoebox to the size of tray, nail it to a post, and fill it with wild bird seed for about 12 visiting chaffinches and the quiet pair of spotted doves.
Our arrival coincided with another, rather more outrageous spring migration – the arrival of the bar-tailed godwits and other Arctic wading birds back into New Zealand. An estimated 70,000 godwits were on their annual non-stop flight from their breeding grounds on the Siberian and Alaskan tundras, seven or eight days on the wing, until landing at shorelines in Spirits Bay, Miranda, Tauranga, Farewell Spit, Kawhia, Tasman Bay, Avon-Heathcote Estuary… All over, here for the summer, their fattened bodies turning red as bricks until they leave in March, although more than 10,000 juveniles stay behind. I went to Miranda in mid September. I wanted to see the new arrivals – I wanted a feeling of that incredible journey, surely the world’s longest without resting on land or water.
Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, had his own feeling about Arctic waders arriving in England: ‘After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on the upland of Flintcombe-Ashe, gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes – eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snowhills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. These nameless birds came quite near Tess and Marian, but of all they had seen which humanity would never see, they brought no account.’
Terraqueous distortions! Genius. Poor show, though, that these ‘nameless’ birds had seen and done all that, and didn’t have anything to say for themselves. Fortunately, Arctic waders have a voice in New Zealand, belonging to Adrian Riegen. When I was out on beaches and oxidation ponds with Gwen, she was always talking about Adrian this, Adrian that. Not entirely jokingly, she called him ‘our guru’ more than once. His continued work on wading birds is well-travelled – banding godwits in Alaska, and helping to set up a nature reserve at Yalu Jiang in China, where thousands of New Zealand godwits refuel on their northward migration – and wide-ranging, with special emphasis on the birds’ migratory path.
Adrian is a classic New Zealand birder – from England, long and loping build, wears a beard. Very nice guy, with a sharp wit. He’s also the practical sort; he
