Take the kingfisher. It’s flourished in urban New Zealand: lots of introduced mice are just dying to have their heads stoved in, and power lines and posts provide excellent viewing platforms above the killing fields. Actually, the kingfisher was once thought to have adapted too well. Buller notes: ‘In Wanganui it provoked the hostility of the Acclimatisation Society by preying on the young of the House sparrow, which had been introduced at great expense; and the committee encouraged a crusade against the offendors by offering a premium on kingfishers’ heads.’
That bizarre story also serves as a reminder of the role played by acclimatisation societies in the array of birds we now take for granted. Filled with longing, and probably wanting to smother New Zealand native birds with a pillow, nineteenth-century British settlers filled the skies with birds from ‘Home’. House sparrows were introduced in 1865 – by Buller: ‘I must plead guilty to having been accessory to their importation, having advertised in the London papers offering a reward of 100 pounds for 100 pairs delivered alive in the colony.’
Starlings arrived in 1862–63, thrushes in 1862–78, blackbirds in 1862–75, mynas in 1870–77. There were also liberations of four kinds of finches (chaffinch, greenfinch, goldfinch, redpoll) and, from Australia, over 1000 magpies. A few species didn’t take; there were, for example, unsuccessful attempts to bring in the nightingale and English robin.
It might be instructive if the grandly named Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society held a poll to determine the public’s least favourite birds. In the pecking order of New Zealand’s bird species, the English birds – common as muck, all over the shop – would rate scarcely above the bottom rung, down there with the rock pigeon, that cooing nincompoop of the city, and the unjustly despised gulls and Australian magpie. But the English birds deserve respect, and admiration. Study of their characteristics and behaviour are just as fulfilling as those of any other bird. Almost certainly the most violent paper ever published in Notornis, the Ornithological Society journal, is ‘Nature Red in Claw: How and Why Starlings Kill Each Other’, the result of a 20-year nest-box study, written by J. E. C. and M. M. Flux, in 1992, complete with graphic photographs of two birds with their claws dug deep into each other’s murdered head.
Good luck to the native birds cowering in the bush. But most of us live at home. The birds around us are brilliant to watch, to observe, to get to know. That most definitely includes the introduced English birds. Example: every now and then during spring, blackbirds decide to attack car mirrors, because they regard their reflection as some new intruder. The show also includes birds that have arrived under their own steam, often from Australia. One of the great appeals of watching birds is the constant change. Birds exit, birds arrive. Birds don’t sit still; they migrate, they turn up in places no one ever anticipates. Places like New Zealand.
Australia has given us birds such as the silvereye in 1865, and the spur-winged plover in 1932: the manager of a borstal farm in Southland alerted bird-watcher Very Reverend C. J. Tocker to a pair of ‘strange birds’. Later, Maida Barlow of Invercargill made plovers her specialist study, recording the oldest bird in New Zealand (it was 16) and writing a minor classic, The Year of the Spur-winged Plover.
Another visitor from Australia set up shop during the war. ‘Rare in New Zealand,’ writes Moncrieff in 1925, about the white-faced heron. ‘There is no record of the nests of this species having been found in New Zealand,’ writes Oliver in 1930. The birds began breeding in New Zealand as recently as 1941, at Shag River in Otago. They are now so widespread, a familiar sight on shores, farms and rugby fields, that it’s strange to imagine a New Zealand without their yellow-toed footprints, without the opportunity to gaze through bins at their lovely plumage of pink turning to grey turning to soft, delicate blue, at the way they croak to each other at dusk, staying close to the nest, protecting a new life.
Tui, Little Barrier
The tribe
A VERY GREAT SIN was committed in the previous chapter, and that was to refer to ‘birdwatchers’. That term just won’t do. It’s nothing short of an insult to people who know about birds. The correct term is birders. English author Mark Cocker sorts that out very early on in his hilarious social history, Birders: Tales of a Tribe, published in 2001. What birders do, he explains through gritted teeth, is called birding. It’s active. It travels vast distances, it takes careful notes, it does things on behalf of birds. What birders don’t do, he adds with heavy emphasis, is indulge in mere bird-watching.
He’s right. Bird-watching is all very well, it doesn’t do anyone any harm, but it’s passive. It’s dozy, indolent. Those content days of autumn and winter at my local bay, armed with sandwiches and cigarettes, quietly picking my way over mud as falling leaves twitched in the sunlight, and smoke rose on the opposite shore from the Chelsea sugar factory – that was bird-watching.
The trouble is that bird-watching is my speed. I lead a dozy, indolent life. I don’t drive; I can go a week without discovering the world beyond the corner dairy. My local bay was even closer than the dairy. If it had stocked cigarettes I would have been the happiest man alive. A few minutes’ trot was all it took to lose myself among the wading birds while the homeless drunk lost himself in Jim Beam and Sprite. And all I did was watch the birds, because I like bird-watching. It’s such an easy pleasure. It doesn’t require hard work. It’s perfectly innocent, even though you can sometimes cut a low, suspicious figure wandering around with a pair of binoculars.
You don’t
