OS was formed in 1940. It nearly became extinct by its own hand in 2006. The executive was on the verge of changing the society’s name to Birding New Zealand. The BNZ! Would they approve overdrafts? It could have been worse – it could have adopted the gross modern habit of adopting a Z to its name, as in Birdenz. Members clearly had a problem with the word ‘Ornithological’ – it was a mouthful, it was unfriendly, it smelled of chalk. Worse, it had a seriousness of intent, and advertised the society’s special expertise.
The move to dumb down its name was rejected. Good. When I joined the OS, it felt like signing up to an elite, a crack force, with its proud tradition and attitude of scholarship. Of course, I was way out of my depth. I came armed with only a bare outline of bird evolution (‘Dinosaurs did not become extinct,’ said David Attenborough. ‘They only flew away.’) And although I swotted up on issues of Notornis and even a 1966 biology text for sixth-form students (‘Of all modern reptiles, crocodiles show the closest anatomical affinities to birds’), and learned that birds maintain a constant internal temperature, alter the pitch of their song by two pairs of muscles somewhere near the trachea, and the turkey scores 93 heartbeats per minute while the house sparrow bangs away at 460, I still found it difficult to identify birds in flight, couldn’t tell a male from a female, and the helpful descriptions of bird calls in the Field Guide (‘Call of the New Zealand Robin is a soft “chirp”’) were of no help whatsoever.
Birders talk about how each bird has its own special life force, its own ‘jizz’. I never saw any evidence of jizz. I retreated from the air to the dark rooms of the imagination. I started dreaming about birds, and hallucinated that I saw birds in words. There was the day I walked along a city street, stopped in my tracks, and turned back to look at what I thought was a really striking sticker about birds on a car window: MIGRANT OF FITNESS. But all it said was WARRANT OF FITNESS.
As someone who writes for a living, and who probably spends more time writing than living, I was more at home in the swirling presence of words than the swirling presence of birds. I curled up with my library of New Zealand bird books. The older the better. These early authors were pioneering something important, something significant; it was exciting to watch our lazy sensual isles at the end of the world take shape through their eyes. As much as I learned from the living OS tribe, I was transported by the dead authors – the tribal elders.
Pied Oystercatcher nests on the sand, Pakiri, 28.12.39
Serbian eagle
NEW ZEALAND’S most famous tribal elder of birds is Herbert Guthrie-Smith. His 1921 book Tutira, a natural history of his Hawke’s Bay sheep station, remains a classic of New Zealand writing, routinely featuring in lists of the best ten or 20 books. But Guthrie-Smith also wrote three books devoted exclusively to birds – Birds of the Water, Wood and Waste (1908), Mutton Birds and Other Birds (1914), and Bird Life on Island and Shore (1925). These little masterpieces overflow with wonder and despair at native birds: his final book, published in 1936, was called The Joys and Sorrows of a New Zealand Naturalist.
A biography of Nelson woman Pérrine Moncrieff (1893–1979) is in the works. About time. She wore a cap of white hens’ feathers dyed sapphire blue, kept a pet macaw called Miss Macawber, and was crucial in the establishment of Abel Tasman National Park in 1942. I spoke to a few people who knew her; they all used exactly the same word: ‘formidable’. She was outspoken, determined. She wasn’t popular. She became a Wildlife Service ranger in 1947, after the department had rejected her on the basis of gender in the 1930s, when she first applied. According to environmental researcher Robin Hodge, she ‘especially wanted to chase up poachers of kereru, godwits and other protected birds.’
As the author of the nifty and best-selling field guide New Zealand Birds and How to Identify Them, Moncrieff was the most high-profile woman ornithologist in New Zealand, when the discipline was – still is, mostly – led by men. As such, writes Hodge, Moncrieff was often reduced to a figure of fun; bird blokes joked about her with lines such as, ‘Come up and see my Tits.’
But she was hardly an outcast. Pérrine and her husband Malcolm Moncrieff were fabulously wealthy. They had servants. Their home shuddered with antiques. As in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, the study of birds in New Zealand was largely confined to the rich. They could afford the time. They were country gents, with English money and C of E credentials, people like Reverend Thomas Henry Potts (1824–88), who ran the massive South Island sheep station Hakatere, and authored Out in the Open, a lovingly composed, attentive book about native birds. He arrived from England in 1851 after making his fortune as an arms manufacturer, although back then they were called gun makers.
Almost all of New Zealand’s truly admired early ornithologists have been awarded an obituary in Notornis. Guthrie-Smith, Moncrieff, W. R. B. Oliver, Charles Fleming, Robert Falla, Bob Stidolph, Dick Sibson, the Wilkinsons of Kapiti Island, Peter Bull, Captain John Jenkins, Count Kazimierz Antoni z Granowa Wodzicki … it can read like a book of the dead. The greatest obituary, the best written, composed with feeling and appreciation, was by Major Robert Wilson of Edgar Stead. It begins: ‘Edgar Stead is dead.’ Wilson and Stead had shared
