The closest I had been to a bird was the dead fairy prion one night at the Papakura croquet club. But I felt an almost physical sensation listening to Adrian describe his practised intimacy with birds – he has banded thousands of waders. ‘Wrybills sit in your hand so easily. Oystercatchers are tough old birds, incredibly placid, but the only thing is that they crap all over you. With the godwits and knots, their bill may be long and pointed, but it’s actually a very delicate bill, and they stress very easily.’
Adrian had the familiar bird-watchers’ confession – ‘I was a teenage twitcher’ – but his interest widened, became seriously ornithological when he got hooked on waders in 1969. He said, ‘It was seeing the buff-breasted sandpiper. These things should have been heading to the pampas in South America, and yet they were on these islands off the west coast of Cornwall. So I started reading more about waders and their fantastic migration. They’re such a global species that wherever you go, you’re going to find waders. And often they’re the same species: you’ve got bar-tailed godwits and red knots here, but you also have them in Britain, America, South Africa, South America. The more you study these birds, the more you want to see where they go.
‘With our bar-tailed godwits, we knew they bred in the Arctic, but how they got here, and how they got back, or which particular parts of the Arctic they used, we had no idea about really. The books said, “Oh, they go via Asia.” Well, that’s a fairly good guess. You didn’t need to be too smart to figure that was probably the case. Once we started banding the birds in the mid 80s, and getting recoveries from Russia, and China, and so on, I started to piece together the story.
‘And you learn that the birds are under phenomenal pressure in Asia when they stop there. People in New Zealand just don’t have any idea. You realise you could easily lose things like the godwits and the knots if their staging areas aren’t protected.’
When I wrote my column in Sunday asking readers to send their bird sightings or experiences, Christchurch poet Jeffrey Paparoa Holman posted a letter enclosing an article from the October 1961 issue of an inflight magazine published by former New Zealand airline, NAC. Amazingly, splendidly, the bar-tailed godwit was the airline’s symbol. The author of the magazine article? ‘That old Huia swatter,’ as Holman referred to him: Sir Walter Buller. Lyrically, Buller described the godwits departing from Spirits Bay in the Far North. He wrote, ‘Just as the sun was dropping into the sea, an old male uttered a strident call, and shot straight into the air, followed by an incredible feathered multitude … There was something of the solemnity of a parting about it.’
Over a century later, Adrian was able to say Buller got it right about the steep ascent, and the timing. ‘It does tend to be evening. Just literally on sunset. But they slip away in littler groups, 20, 30, 40, maybe 50 birds, without too much fanfare…’
Because I was off to Miranda in a few days time to see the first godwits arrive for the summer, I asked about their landfall to New Zealand. He said, ‘I was in Tauranga in October last year, and there were about 20, 30 godwits feeding at high tide, desperately looking for food everywhere, and dragging their wings along, which is a sign they had just arrived. They’ve had them held out for over a week, so when they land, of course, they can’t fold them in, they’re too stiff, and they wander around looking as though they’ve been shot. So we were looking at birds that morning which had arrived in the night after an 11,000-kilometre flight.
‘And occasionally people have seen them land and not be able to stand up properly, almost like they’re falling over. Generally, you don’t see birds fall over, do you? But for the godwits, it’s like getting their land legs back. They land, and their legs collapse under them. It’s something you rarely see – you’ve got to be able to witness that initial landing, that very minute.’
I wasn’t that lucky at Miranda. But it was a brilliant outing, led by Keith Woodley of the Miranda Shorebird Centre near Thames – how it grated on him that all the signs along that glimmering, white-shell shore stated ‘SEABIRD COAST’. The point of Miranda and Thames was its shore birds, 43 species, with a summer population of about 200,000 waders. Keith was very nearly a classic New Zealand birder – long and loping build, wears a beard, but came from Invercargill. He’s an accomplished artist. He lives in a house right next to the centre. It was a rather desolate spot, a sea breeze stirring the flax, and his only neighbours were birds; and yet, like me, he couldn’t drive. He hosts 12,000 visitors a year. There is a lodge at the centre for overnight accommodation – the day I arrived, a merry group of Lionesses were drying dishes and making lewd jokes.
Keith walked me towards the shore. As a bonus, there was a single white heron, white and absolutely enormous, reaching to the sky on its slender black legs. I could add it to my year twitching list of the black stilt, the terek sandpiper, and a very weird sighting of an albino oystercatcher. Feeding on the tide were 300 wrybill, about 500 red knots, and 1500 to 1800 bar-tailed godwits.
The godwits were slim – they lose drastic amounts of body fat on the long voyage to New Zealand – and small, and slow, and dazed, and greedy. Their sensitive bills probed the sand for
