How to Watch a Bird

by Steve Braunias

  What a singular book. Birds, everywhere; but in the background, quiet, constant, a warm presence, are the figures of Stead and Buddle. Their ‘henchman’ has written a love story.

  Young Morepork, Great King, 2.12.45

  An old rooster

  STEAD, BUDDLE, WILSON: I was too late for these legends, they had flown the coop, but I took a cab on a warm afternoon in March to snare a living legend in his Titirangi nest. Everyone in New Zealand ornithology knows of Geoff Moon. He is very likely the best bird photographer this country has ever produced. I already owned a copy of his first book, the stunning Focus on New Zealand Birds, published in 1957. When I noticed in the bookstores a new book under his name, with the rather familiar title New Zealand Birds in Focus, I figured it was perhaps his son. It couldn’t be the same bloke, I reasoned. Not after 50 years. But the author of 2006 was the one and the same author of 1957, now a slender, quite hilarious old rooster who was about to turn 91.

  His laugh was a loud and immensely cheerful hoot: ‘Hah!’ He had a very generous head of hair. His eyes were sharp. He migrated from England in 1947; his mating habits have produced four children; he said, ‘I love the sea. And plants. And the bush. And insects…’

  Above all, he loved birds. You could see that at a glance in his photographs, and you could also detect a keen knowledge and understanding of birds. He said, ‘I’m not so much interested in photographing birds just for a portrait. I’m interested in bird behaviour. That’s why I spend a lot of time in hides not taking photographs, just taking notes. I actually don’t like being labelled a bird photographer. I’m a naturalist at heart.’

  Of all his books, perhaps his masterpiece is the sumptuous Birds Around Us (1979). He took a quiet pride in his work, but what moved him was the subject. Moon knew that other New Zealand, a particular geography where borders and centres were defined by birds. When you looked at the photographs, you felt the photographer’s pleasure – red-crested parakeets inside a hole in a pohutakawa tree overhanging a cliff on Hen Island, welcome swallows flying to a nest under a road bridge near Hikurangi, reef herons in a cave on an islet near Kawau Island, crested grebes in a nest of sticks and water weeds on Lake Alexandra.

  He did an awful lot more than take pictures. Moon’s field notes were a significant influence on the 1966 Field Guide. In more recent years, OS members have vigorously lobbied for him to be elected a Life Fellow of the society. They are right to resent the fact that their applications have so far been rejected.

  Moon’s greatest work has been on moreporks and kingfishers. He captured the first photograph of a diving kingfisher showing that a protective membrane closes over its eye just as it touches water. He devoted countless hours to spying on the morepork. When it flew he heard nothing, but felt a wind on his face: ‘The wings of a morepork have this velvety edge to the flight feathers, so they fly absolutely silently.’ Once, high up in a tree at some ungodly hour waiting to get eye to eye with that night owl, he electrocuted himself on a 2500-volt charge while changing a flash bulb, ‘felt a sensation of being inflated’, and was knocked unconscious. ‘Lucky I didn’t fall off and kill myself,’ he said. ‘Hah! Oh dear.’

  It was rather startling when Moon pointed to a book by the acclaimed British nature photographer Heather Angel and said, ‘She’s a real goer.’ But this was his highest form of praise. He meant she got out there, investigated, did the work.

  He’s that same kind of active bird, or was – it had been two years since he last lurked inside one of his famous home-made wooden hides in the New Zealand bush. ‘It is a wonderful experience being in a hide,’ he said, with real longing. So much of his life has passed in one of these contraptions: ‘I got up to Mark 7b.’ Built from light timber frames, covered with either canvas or a sheet of calico painted to stiffen them against a breeze, the hides went with him all over New Zealand. You can see them neatly folded on the roof of his Cortina in a photo taken sometime in the 1970s in his latest book. The car is stuck in shingle near Lake Ellesmere. Moon is jacking the car up. He looks the happiest man alive.

  On the afternoon I visited, he had the run of the house; his wife Lynette was visiting a grandchild in Malaysia. There were cut flowers in a vase. The carpet seemed freshly vacuumed. Dominating one wall was a framed letter and a drawing of an English dipper, sent to him by the artist Raymond Ching in 1961. I stretched out my legs and was in no hurry to leave. When he said his basement was full of Bolex 16mm films of diving gannets, I shivered with delight at the thought of a basement in Titirangi containing so much life.

  I asked about his life. He was born in China. He could trace his ancestry back to a knight who served William the Conqueror. Sent to school in Essex, he explored a fabulous marshland, teeming with things such as voles and poisonous adders. He trained to be a vet, and remembers boiling a dead dog’s head on a gas ring. He was sent to the Isle of Wight during the war – the Germans dropped a bomb on a herd of cows. He liked the sound of New Zealand, and ignored a friend who wrote him a six-page letter stating reasons not to come here. He set up practice in Warkworth.

  He knew all the leading names in New Zealand ornithology. There was Ken Bigwood, who pioneered bird sound recordings: ‘Very difficult man to get on with.’ There was the black-backed gull watcher and much else, Graham Turbott, now in a rest-home in Epsom: ‘Very nice fellow. Quiet chap.’ There was Dr Michael Soper: ‘Probably our best photographer of birds. Wasn’t an easy guy to get on with.’

  Moon had a gentle manner. The way he moved revealed an obvious agility and strength. Above all, there was a curiosity about him, a lively intelligence. He said, ‘I hated school. Except for sport. And chemistry. And art. And physics. And geography.’ He didn’t hate school at all, except for Latin. ‘I used to daydream through a boring Latin lesson, and make plans about where I’d go wandering in the marshes. Nature was in my blood right from the start.’

  When he was ten, he discovered a sparrowhawk’s nest with three chicks in a tree. Inspired by the bird photographer Oliver Pike, he built a hide near the nest. Moon writes in his latest book: ‘I entered it soon after dawn … I held my breath when the chicks started to squeak as they saw a parent arriving to feed them. I was transfixed and my heart was pounding as I watched … In spite of the extreme discomfort of sitting in the hide on a leaning branch, I spent several hours there, fascinated by the amazing spectacle I was observing at such close quarters.’

  What he wanted was to record the moments. He bought an enormous Thornton-Pickard at a junk stall, but was unable to afford a good lens – until a newspaper bought a photo he took of his aunt’s cat eating a cucumber. Preposterous, but he was on his way. The tools of his trade were his bins and his scope, and the TP Reflex and Sanderson field camera, the Asahi Pentax, the Olympus OM-1, the Mamiya RB67, the Nikon F100, the Nikon F4…

  I asked him a simple question: how to watch a bird. He had a simple answer. ‘Birds have a great sense of hearing. Don’t bash through the bush if you want to see them. You see far more if you just take the trouble to sit down. I used to carry a plastic bag so I could sit down on a wet bank. Just sit down, and quietly watch. All sorts of things happen.’

  White-eye feeding young, Okere, 14.1.38

  An older rooster

  IN THE BEGINNING Turbott. With his deep sense of modesty, he will doubtless despair at the suggestion he is godlike, but at 92 Turbott is the grand old man of New Zealand ornithology. Along with legends such as Stead, Wilson, and Moncrieff, he was among a select group of only 15 people who formed the Ornithological Society of New Zealand in 1938.

  Turbott is the only one of those originals left standing. Which he was, quite capably thanks, his long, loping stride carrying his classic New Zealand male birder’s build – tall, rangy, trim as a tent pole – when I had the pleasure of visiting him at his retirement apartment on an afternoon in May. He kept a tidy ship. The apartment was immaculate. He had his Pentax 7 X 50 bins on the window ledge. Later, he fished out the birder’s other essential tool
of the trade – a small water proof notebook to record his observations. He had literally filled enough notebooks to last a lifetime: Turbott was a birder back when they were called birdwatchers, as a boy growing up in Stanley Bay on Auckland’s North Shore, and later as staff zoologist at the Auckland Museum from 1937 to 1957, assistant director of the Canterbury Museum for the next seven years, then back at the Auckland Museum as director for 15 years, until retiring in 1979.

  Born in 1914, he was a foundation pupil at Takapuna Grammar in 1927. He took to birds early. He said, ‘There are people who take to bird-watching as a pleasure without hesitating. It just needs a bit of sympathetic observing; it’s a personal pleasure to identify the bird you’re looking at, to develop the habit of accurate observing. When you look at Geoff Moon’s photos, you know he’s aware of the exact shape and colour and habit of the bird. A little old lady said to me the other day, “There’s a bird with yellow on its head out with the sparrows.” But it was a goldfinch. It has yellow on its shoulders, not on its head.’

  As a child, it was Turbott’s fate that he lived down the street from Robert Falla – later Sir Robert Falla – an early authority on New Zealand birds, who would be Turbott’s co-author on the landmark 1966 Field Guide. Turbott said, ‘I was very lucky. He was terribly good when I was a kid. I remember one day he told me to catch a tram to Greenwood Corner, where he picked me up and we went to Manukau Harbour. We got there, and I remember him saying, “Now, there’s a Caspian tern.” He said, “Borrow my field glasses.” The only tool a birdwatcher needs is something with which to get a closer look. That was the moment I became addicted.’

  Turbott’s story is the story of New Zealand ornithology. Of course, he bought a copy of Moncrieff’s New Zealand Birds when it was published in 1925 (he was still at primary school) and then W. R. B. Oliver’s volume, in 1930: ‘That was a big event.’ He met both the authors – he met everyone.

  There was Edgar Stead: ‘The best shot in the South Island. In a way he was the tail-end of the Buller tradition. Stead was the first recorder of a whole lot of migrants coming to Lake Ellesmere, and he popped them off. I was at the tail-end of it, too… Oh, sure! Any self-respecting bird section of any museum in those days had a gun. I’ve shot up the odd specimen. I popped off a few fantails from the Three Kings. I’ve been guilty. But I’ve never shot a saddleback…’

  He explored offshore islands for birds with Major Wilson, as well as Major Buddle, who became a close friend: ‘I knew him as Bud. He was a marvellous chap. He was obviously a brave man – DSO was the highest honour next to the VC. He’d been badly gassed, and could walk only a short distance without panting. I’ve been so lucky in going to places that are really primitive New Zealand – the Hen and Chickens, Little Barrier, Poor Knights. These are unaltered places, and Bud and I did as much of that as we could. He lived under Mount Hobson and drove an early model car. I went to the Poor Knights with both the majors. They were very strict about camp discipline, but they were both such good fun.’

  Turbott had such knowledge, such experience; it seemed a dreadful oversight he had not been made Sir Graham. He even served his country, as they say. One of the very strangest chapters in New Zealand ornithology is known as the ‘Cape Expedition’ – a totally hush-hush operation, in which Turbott and a band of colleagues were sent by the government to perform coast-watching duties on the subantarctic Auckland Islands during World War II. ‘Cape Expedition’ was the code name. Turbott’s year-long tour of duty began on 20 December 1943, sailing into Ranui Cove on the New Golden Hind, a luxury 91-foot yacht built by a wealthy Auckland businessman.

  The men were issued with full army kit, but dressed as civilians. If captured, they were to say they were fishermen. Their job? To keep an eye on enemy shipping. They didn’t see any. There wasn’t any. But in between his daily inspections of the flat, undisturbed horizon at 6 a.m., midday and 6 p.m., Turbott kept himself busy. He read War and Peace, three times over, and took advantage of that rare opportunity to take detailed notes of sea birds such as the Arctic tern and the southern skua.

  Island life was cold, it was barren, it was strictly for the birds. Turbott enjoyed that year just fine. Very little seemed to perturb him. He was a lovely man, kind and considerate, and he had a very sly sense of humour. Also, and this is a quality that really only few old people possess, he was wise. There was something about him – maybe it was his sense of equilibrium.

  I asked him about the birds of his childhood, and he staggered me by quoting from one of my columns in Sunday magazine. I’d written: ‘Bravo to the protected species huddling on sanctuaries and islands. But most of us live at home … I am in love with the birds around us.’ Turbott said, ‘You made an important point – “most of us live at home”. We don’t go to Little Barrier or Fiordland and so on. The birds we have in New Zealand are partly the introduced species, and partly the natives. The natives are very much divided into those that adapted and live all around us, and those that took a bombshell after colonisation.

  ‘The answer to your question is that in our Stanley Bay garden we had blackbirds, thrushes, silvereyes, finches, fantail, grey warbler, and kingfisher. They were the birds all around us. And they’re marvellous birds. I’m all for blackbirds. Most successful bird in the world, really. Ecologically, it’s perhaps the most important. It’s everywhere: it’s the one that’s eating the insect pests in the garden, and the fields. In its own right it’s a handsome bird, and that’s partly why I was keen to go to Oxford – in my earlier days, the British Council offered me a trip for six months to the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology – to see what the British made of their own birds.

  ‘It varies in New Zealand as to which birds have survived under which circumstances. Some native birds have penetrated into the exotic forests – whitehead and robin are common. We have a give and take going on. The whole thing’s a dynamic, because we’re getting birds from Australia – the spur-winged plover, the swallow.’

  I mentioned to him that he had seen only the second recorded welcome swallow in New Zealand, in 1941 on the Cape Expedition. He said, ‘A lot of species are new since I was a boy. And yet kingfishers were already revelling in the colonial landscape. As Edgar Stead quite rightly said, “The coming of telephone wires was heaven for kingfishers.” He even drew the difference between copper-drawn wires and steel wires, as to which the kingfisher liked best.

  ‘That’s been one of my main interests, the situation as the landscape changes. New Zealanders could do with being more relaxed in the settled landscape, which is what you were getting at in your article. There’s a growing tendency to discount any interest in anything other than the rare native birds. I don’t know whether it’s a Calvinistic reaction against the sins of our grandparents, but it’s as if you’re not allowed to speak about anything except a kakapo or a saddleback.

  ‘That’s getting a bit extreme. I suppose a lot of the Department of Conservation staff’s bread and butter depends on working on them. Well, fine. I would spend money on saving the last kakapo. It’s immensely demanding; Don Merton is showing what can be done with saving the black robin. We’re famous all over the world for making this effort. And yet, why not live in our landscape as it is?

  ‘At present – and I can say this because I’ve spent more time than most people out in the utter wilds, looking for rare birds that have survived only in the bush – it’s a matter of preserving birds if we can. That’s the new movement of controlling rats and stoats in patches of bush in places like Waitakere and Karori. If you do enough of that you can have rare native birds, even stitch bird and saddleback. But they won’t survive unless basic controls are carried out. On the whole, the birds that are survivors are the ones that maybe matter ecologically.’

  Turbott had been to so many offshore islands, and now he was in a retirement village in Auckland with a view of a phoenix palm. I asked about the birds around him. He picked up his Pentax bins, looked out the window, and said, ‘There are thrush
singing, fantail, grey warbler in the garden next door. Just there, there’s a blackbird in possession of that power box. He’s whitewashed the top of it. About now they’re beginning to stake out their territories, and getting quite aggressive for spring.

  ‘About 30 or 40 mynahs roost in that palm. Better still, for two years I’ve watched kingfishers nesting just beneath them – they get in and make a small hole so the mynahs can’t get at the chicks. Whatever helps native birds to get established is interesting.’

  On my way out I lingered at the doorway. He suddenly thought of something, took off on those long, loping legs, came back and said, ‘This was Bud’s.’ He held out a relic, a great big old torch that had belonged to Major Geoffrey Buddle, DSO, MC, Serbian Eagle. Would anyone mind too much if I said that he was carrying an eternal flame?

  Nesting colony of Caspian Terns on the beach at Mangawai, 21.10.40

  Dear Gwen

  YOU CAN TELL a lot about a person by the way they receive someone else’s good news. Not sure how to react, formal, mildly congratulatory – ‘I’m so pleased.’ Who knows what becomes of the half-hearted, but you don’t really want to bother with people like that. When I told Gwenda Pulham the happiest news of my life, one evening when she picked me up to go to the monthly meeting of the Auckland OS, she fairly squawked with joy. I had a feeling she might. She doesn’t do anything by halves, least of all from her heart.

  I met Gwen on the first night I plucked up courage to attend an OS meeting. It was held in a freezing cold lecture room on the Unitec campus. A two-dollar donation at the door, 21 people in attendance, tea-bag tea and malt biscuits upstairs in the kitchen. I wrapped myself up tight in an overcoat and listened to veteran ornithologist Dick Veitch give a talk about the crisis facing red knots in America’s Delaware Bay. Yes, most interesting. Afterwards, notable bird sightings were shared. A white heron, the solitary kotuku, had been seen at the public toilets in Kaukapakapa on the Kaipara Harbour. Various other topics came up, and one voice interjected the most, opinionated and inquiring, always there with a question or a trenchant point of view. I thought: I must talk to her. This was Gwen, who became my closest birding friend.