Binoculars is a long, ungainly word, and no one who goes bird-watching wastes time with all those syllables. The proper term is bins, just as the proper term for the next big step, a telescope, is scope. Scopes are widescreen. They cost serious money. You have to cart them around. I travel light. Also, I’m cheap.
Bins are like a portable TV. As such, my favourite programme in the autumn and winter of 2006 took place at the bay around the corner from my apartment. I trotted down there four or five days a week, at low tide and high tide, the tide shuffling in and the tide shuffling out on a mud-flat next to the Auckland harbour bridge. There were South Island pied oystercatcher – SIPO they’re called – and kingfisher, and three species of shag, and a pair of white-faced heron. There was also a homeless guy who possibly slept under an overturned dinghy on the beach. He owned a sack and a transistor. He drank Jim Beam mixed with Sprite lemonade. He held long conversations with himself, attempting to provide answers to a series of indignant questions. I would be creeping towards the SIPOs at the water’s edge on a low tide, and hear him ask himself in a strangled voice: ‘But you never went to her funeral, did you, so what are you talking about?’ Poor devil.
The bins made the birds look immense. It’s often thought that New Zealand birds are dowdy and downright boring in appearance, but this is a foolish, mistaken notion. Take the SIPOs. They are common enough: the population is estimated at about 85,000, along almost the entire coastal stretch of New Zealand. They breed inland, vast numbers nesting on South Island river beds, and many choose to winter in the warmer northern climates. They are a striking bird, clearly identified by the clean, sharp lines of their black and white plumage, and their vivid red bill. In bright sunlight, the bill – ‘remarkably long and remarkably red,’ wrote a hero of this book, bird photographer Major Geoffrey Buddle – flames up into a juicy, translucent orange, and so do their eyes.
I kept my distance – it would be despicable to interrupt the vital time wading birds have to feed – when they arrived on the tide shuffling out. The SIPOs inched the shoreline from east to west. They stabbed at bivalves, turning their heads sideways and often under the shallow water as their bill prised open the shells. Not, by the way, of oysters. Buddle: ‘If you ask me why “oystercatcher”, I must confess that I do not know. I have never seen one catch an oyster nor attempt to; anyway, I doubt very much if it could it would, or for that matter would if it could, for the simple reason that crabs, shrimps, sand hoppers, and so on are available in plenty just for the taking. However, oyster-catcher it is and has long been all the world over, and there is nothing we can do about it.’
It may or may not be a shame that Buddle fails to provide salacious ruminations on why a shag is called a shag. Officially, they are called cormorants, and I have talked to New Zealand ornithologists who are strict about only ever using that term. Perhaps they dislike the fact its popular name shares the word we use for one of our most popular activities. However, shag it is, and there is nothing we ought to do about it. Like the oystercatcher, the shag is a common sight around New Zealand shores: everyone is familiar with its dramatic pose, that gesture of mercy, when it spreads its wings wide apart to dry after underwater fishing.
Down at my local bay, the SIPOs and the shags filled my bins for many happy hours. So did the New Zealand kingfishers, when they sat immobile on exposed rocks on the shore, and in the overhanging branches of pohutakawa. They waited like that to fly off at incredible speeds in a direct line at their prey, which they caught and then smashed to appalling bloody pieces against a branch. I watched one do this for many happy minutes to a mouse. It stoved its head in. Such violence, and yet the kingfisher has the most peaceful and musical of Latin classifications, Halcyon sancta.
Then there were the pair of white-faced heron. In the years I lived beside a mangrove creek I had adored their yellow-toed stealth and graceful flight. Now, at the bay, I spied on their feeding at the water’s edge, and in rock pools. Craftily, they rake up the mud floor with one foot, and then pounce on anything desirable that moves. At high tide, I followed the herons as they flew over the bay, across the road, and into a stand of pine trees. They had built a shaggy nest in the crook of high branches. I liked to watch them there towards dusk. As the light dimmed, the trees and the herons lost their texture and became black shapes, a silhouette, an outline. The birds became creatures made of wood. Wood that made a noise: as one bird settled into the nest, the other would pace along nearby branches, and both would set up a long bout of possibly affectionate croaking.
The herons, kingfishers, oystercatchers and good shags were just in the one bay. There are over 200 regular species of bird in New Zealand, urban and rural, at sea and on shore, a swirling presence, yours for the viewing.
Grey Noddy, Curtis Island, 7.12.06
The trouble with Walter
WHERE SHOULD YOU be looking, and when? And what are you actually looking for, and looking at? Once again, you need to borrow someone else’s eyes. Beginners and experts alike need a field guide. A guide is a birdwatcher’s second best friend. There are a few titles available, but
