‘As time passed,’ wrote that emotional Victorian ornithologist James Drummond, ‘the birds that had come down to these parts found they possessed a land of surpassing goodness.’ It’s long been supposed that mammals were absent in New Zealand, although the discovery in late 2006 of three small bones in Central Otago proved that a mammal species had existed here, about 16 million years ago. ‘This ranks up there with the discovery of the first moa bones, and the first dinosaur bones in New Zealand,’ Te Papa’s fossil curator, Alan Tennyson, told The New Zealand Herald. Really? It’s true that the find exploded a myth. But steady on. The mammal was about the size of a mouse. Tennyson: ‘This shows the land of birds is not true. However, if land mammals were this size, the story may not have changed much…’
In a land without predators, birds never had it so good. Strangely, no photos exist from that period, but you can see it imagined in those fantastic paintings, dripping with ancient ooze and populated with outrageous bird-people, by Bill Hammond. The Christchurch painter has said the inspiration for his famous series came from a visit to the subantarctic Auckland Islands in 1991. ‘I saw a New Zealand before there were men, women, dogs and possums.’
He saw a New Zealand where birds were right out in front. That stern Victorian ornithologist James Drummond seemed to find this a deplorable state of affairs. ‘Life was too easy for them; so many first neglected, and then lost, the power of flight, and dropped into an indolent way of doing things, which became their undoing.’
Actually, mankind became their undoing. We are often fed the line that early Maori formed a deep spiritual bond with the natural world, treated it with awe and respect. That line has quite a lot going for it. Probably the best instance is Margaret Orbell’s book Birds of Aotearoa: A Natural and Cultural History, which reads like an ode to the assorted glorious harmonies between Maori and New Zealand’s birds.
You won’t read anything like that about the first European settlers. Ornithological literature tends to cast white colonists as a barbarian horde who sacked the land. They felled bush and drained swamps. They introduced predators. They shot birds for sport, or to collect the skins.
Shocking, disgraceful. But Maori hunting and Maori-introduced predators, including the rat and the dog, led to the extinction of all nine species of ‘indolent’ moa, various species of goose, duck, adzebill, rail, coot, the magnificent Haast’s eagle, and other birds – in fact, the number far outweighs the avian species made extinct since the arrival of the first Europeans.
Point-scoring of this nature only conforms to the national pastime of separating every issue in New Zealand society to either side of a racial divide. Yes, the moa – with its estimated population of 187,590 reduced to precisely zero – fell victim to what Tim Flannery, author of The Future Eaters, calls ‘the black hole’ theory of extinction, meaning that they fell into that dark, bottomless pit known as the human gob. But much of New Zealand was still birdland when James Cook sailed into view. When the Endeavour entered Queen Charlotte Sound on 17 January 1770, the dawn chorus sang its head off – ‘a melodious wild musick’, as heard by the ship’s naturalist, Joseph Banks.
The sound we hear now is an unplugged version. The catastrophe of two waves of human settlement has diminished bird populations, and forced many on to offshore islands. Over the past 50 years, efforts by conservationists have attempted, and sometimes succeeded, in bringing endangered birds back to the mainland, and in extreme cases back from the brink. Fantastic. We want them around. All birds make us feel happy, feel better about where we live, but the point is that it’s not about our feelings – it’s actually about the birds.
I learned something the night I brought along an advance proof copy of Extinct Birds of New Zealand, a handsome new illustrated book published by Te Papa, to an Ornithological Society meeting in Auckland. If anyone wanted to have a look at it, I said, they were welcome. It proved attractive bait. Really, it was like bringing a crate of booze to AA. They flocked around it, they pawed at it, inspecting the pictures, reading out bits of text, cooing and cawing and sounding expert opinions. In short, they loved it. But as well as the noises of admiration for author Alan Tennyson and artist Paul Martinson, there were constant sighings. It was actually a sad gathering. They felt cheated. A stillness had entered the room: I was a messenger of death. These birdwatchers were looking at birds they would never see.
They had seen so many birds, handled their soft warm bodies, studied them in depth – they were fans of birds, they followed their careers, but it was an awful lot deeper than that. They craved life. A valuable lesson, and a good place for me to start learning how to watch a bird.
Little Pied Shag on her nest calls to her mate, while a pair of Big Black Shags rest after feeding young, Foxton, 27.11.42
A good shag
IF YOU WANT to know how to watch a bird, what you do is borrow someone else’s eyes. There are a few ways of going about this. The first and best way is to get a pair of binoculars. They really do feel like another person has moved in. Actually, they are another person, a bird-watcher’s best friend. They do what you most want: they bring you closer to the bird.
The effect is quite staggering at first; after continued use, it’s still quite staggering. I never get
