Ah, I thought. Here I am in the Ffolkes Arms Hotel in Norfolk with a xenophobic birder. What to make of him after he vented such a horrible little rage? He had looked so shifty when he gave that speech. But late the next day, on our way back to Cambridge, I put all my feelings of revulsion aside: he parked on a country lane, and said that perhaps, if we waited a few minutes, I might see something special. We hung around for about ten minutes. We trained our bins on the sky. And then, with a deep call to the east, something appeared – cranes. We saw these long, giant birds in flight, heads and legs outstretched, then land right in front of us, in a row, eleven of them, great big lanky birds, a thrilling arrival just before dusk, a few miles around the corner from a village that really was called Horsey. It was the closest I ever felt to England.
Red-billed Gulls, Mokohinau
Summer
THE SUMMER OF 2007 – all that broad daylight making New Zealand once again the land of the long white page – was five royal spoonbills in Island Bay, a marsh sandpiper in Little Waihi, a wandering tatler among 35 turnstones near the seal colony in Kaikoura, a Baird’s sandpiper at Lake Ellesmere, a Mongolian dotterel on Cow Island, a kookaburra on telegraph wires near Waiwera, a kaka mobbed by three tui in Albany, a sharp-tailed sandpiper on the Ashley river bed, a glossy ibis in Blenheim, a Hudsonian godwit at Port Waikato, and the channel-billed cuckoo was sighted on Motiti Island off Mount Maunganui, then on telegraph wires near the roundabout at Bethlehem, and later feeding on a plum tree in Tauranga.
It was the season of the Australian vagrant flittering around on our shores. Birders and twitchers were out in force too, courtesy of Wrybill Tours, Driftwood Eco-Tours, Kiwi Wildlife Tours, Manu Tours and other guides, on board ocean pelagic tours, stalking the bush, inspecting wader counts, finding whatever they could find. Tourist numbers included nine Taiwanese birders, trooping along the hot January sands of Pakiri beach, weighed down with bins and scopes and cameras, and being led by a Kiwi Wildlife birding guide to a single pair of breeding fairy terns. A former English twitcher, now living in the Far North, notched his life list of New Zealand birds up to 187, and asked: ‘Who keeps a world year list?’ He had scored an amazing 920 birds in 2006.
Brent Stephenson of Wrybill Tours got his New Zealand record of 206 birds. It included positive ID of that bird given up for dead, the New Zealand storm petrel, in the Hauraki Gulf, a pectoral sandpiper at Miranda, a taiko in the Chatham Islands, a glossy ibis at Travis Wetland in Christchurch, a nankeen kestrel in the Far North, and bird number 193 was a rock wren in the snow – in December! – at the Homer Tunnel. It got him thinking about what would really be possible for a proper Big Year twitch in New Zealand, which is to say the remorseless pursuit of birds every day for 365 days, no expenses spared, throwing up in the sea one day and circling a sewage pond the next; he estimated a grand total of 255 birds.
For the less ambitious that summer, there were pleasures in locating a long-tailed cuckoo near Okere Falls, 2500 godwits at Karaka, and a weka swimming in Southland. There were special excitements. An Australian wood duck turned up at the Hokitika sewage ponds, although it eluded a party of nine British twitchers, and numerous attempts were made to confirm reports of a Japanese snipe at Whangamarino Wetland. Despite no accepted records of it appearing in New Zealand, there were rumours of a brown falcon chasing sparrows in the Far North; it was neither confirmed or denied that a stray leopard seal washed up in Fiordland, and scoffed five crested penguins; and there was some mystery about why SIPOs attacked over 100 fresh hay bales in a paddock in Southland. Other tales of common assault included pukekos killing two red-billed gull chicks at Sulphur Point in Rotorua; they were fed to juvenile pukekos, who ate the head and ignored the rest.
This was New Zealand measured by birds, the harvests of summer bringing birds to its shores and its forests, its river beds and its sewage ponds, its telegraph wires and its suburban backyards. Godwits had returned from Siberia to eat up large; wrybill moved up from the South Island to feed on Auckland harbours. When I returned from England, the thing that immediately struck me was New Zealand’s lushness. It felt full to bursting. In my own backyard, song thrushes devoured a nashi pear tree in December and January, and silvereyes and spotted doves thrashed around in the fig-tree in February.
North of Auckland, at Ruakaka beach, a dune was roped off to protect a colony of New Zealand dotterels – their chicks had hatched, and scuttled across the sand like marbles. At other beaches and coves, SIPOs whizzed around my head whenever I unwittingly came too close to their young, and I watched a solitary godwit dunk its head under the tide to get at something with its long, sensitive bill.
Out at the Mangere oxidation ponds one day with Gwen, we saw approximately 1000 wrybill – a fifth of the world’s entire population –
