How to Watch a Bird

by Steve Braunias

  A hen Bellbird, Little Barrier, 25.2.48

  Birdland

  THE AIR WAS full of feathers and cries – all across the country. I began writing about birds in my weekly column in Sunday, and then asked readers what they had seen, and when, and where. They responded at length. The word count of emails added up to over 13,000, half the size of this book. A dozen or so readers also sent in those things written in pen and delivered in a stamped, if I have the word correctly, envelope. They came from south, north, east, west and Hamilton. They came from farmers, sailors, poets, politicians, pests, hippies, lawyers, scientists and exiled fans of Tottenham Hotspur. I was very grateful. I read every word. They gave the pleasing illusion that 800 years after the first humans arrived, New Zealand was once again restored to its original state – birdland.

  The findings? Birds mattered. Birds were important, vital, emblematic of an essential New Zealand happiness. Birds were right out in front, and the correspondents reported from a distance, in the background, fascinated and observant: the sorrows and joys of so many casual naturalists, compiling a record of bird life in New Zealand in 2006.

  Some of it was useful. Glenda of Kawhia reported that in the past five years the population of royal spoonbills had increased from three to 25, and this year the harbour had also seen the first arrival of two white herons. Dianne of Whenuapai counted 27 sulphur-crested cockatoos (possibly the descendants of flocks reported in the late 1960s in Waingaro, or of a flock once smuggled into Port Levy and released from a ship) in a stand of trees in May, as well as two kookaburras – quite certainly the descendants of that strange nineteenth-century experiment when George Grey, New Zealand’s two-time governor, transported wallabies and Australian birds to his home on Kawau Island.

  Joan had sightings of Barbary doves on the lawn of the Philosophical Society in Orewa. Brian knew when 90 percent of the world’s population of wrybills spend the high tide on the roof at Tranzrail’s Otahuhu marshalling yards. Julia had a black fantail – the first she’d ever seen in many years of bush walking – flit from her shoulder to her head in a garden in Marlborough.

  Corrine summoned the ghost of Major Geoffrey Buddle when she wrote of taking her elderly mother to the top of Sanatorium Hill in Cambridge every year from late August to late September, when tui (highest count, 19) come for the nectar of Prunus campanulata, or Taiwan cherry tree: the hill is named after the old TB sanatorium where Buddle made his recovery from gas poisoning in World War I. It was good to think of native birds gorging themselves on the spot where that old soldier came for his cure.

  Robin, a commercial pilot from Christchurch, gave detailed sightings of 27 species, but was circumspect about the royal albatross: ‘I have witness accounts of a colony, other than at Taiaroa Head, on the South Island mainland, which the farmer does not want DOC to know about for fear of having his land confiscated. I know the location of this site.’

  There was a kind offer of expert help with this book from Amanda, a research assistant to an American Ph. D. student who had studied Pycroft’s petrels on Lady Alice Island: ‘Each evening we headed into the scrub carrying microphones to record the birds’ vocalisations as they circled overhead, preparing to return to their burrows. We would hear little more than faint peeps in the dark … then an enormously unceremonious crashing as each one entered the foliage, hitting various layers on the way down, and made our way to the source to find the bird sitting silent and dazed enough to allow us within reaching distance. Eventually it would waddle in any number of directions, at length finding its burrow, chasing the tuataras out and slowly disappearing inside. Such a bird could only have evolved with so little sense of its own vulnerability in New Zealand.’

  There was this strange anecdote from an enthusiastic amateur, Melanie of Waiuku: ‘Last summer, on the way to visit my uncles in Nuhaka, we drove via the Waikaremoana road. It was the most amazing scenery I’d seen. We unfortunately came across a German lady who had had an accident and her car was balanced on the side of a 300-foot drop, saved only by a small tree. My husband and some other people tried to tow her out, and I walked up the road to warn traffic as it was a blind corner. I stood on this hill, and for as far as I could see was bush, and the bird call was deafening – it was scenery you couldn’t see from the car. A large brown bird flew right in front of me being chased by a bright green bird that was much smaller. Only the day before, my husband had given me a book for Christmas, Birds of New Zealand: A Locality Guide by Stuart Chambers. I was able to confirm it was a long-tailed cuckoo being chased by a yellow-crowned parakeet. I was so excited…’ This was literally a cliff-hanger: not a word more on the fate of the unfortunate Frau.

  Alan of Rodney rushed in with a wet blanket: ‘Although a New Zealander, I spent more than 30 years abroad, where I did most of my bird-watching. While NZ has many fascinating species, the harsh reality is that we live in an ornithological desert and I seldom go out walking with binoculars these days. I live on a 10-acre block where we have a good quality bush section with mature native trees. After two years here my bird list is a paltry 30 species, of which 16 are introduced – 10 natives and only four endemic species make up the list. I have seen nothing here that you would consider of interest for your book.’ But then he cheered up – he was an OS beach patroller at Muriwai, which afforded rich pickings: ‘It offers the chance of seeing (albeit dead) unusual birds that there is virtually no other way of seeing.’ It moved him to poetry: ‘Large birds, such as the albatrosses, are too heavy so we cut off the heads and only bring this back.’

  There were missing birds. Mike Lee, chair of the Auckland Regional Council, sent in a copy of his doleful paper ‘Failed attempts to reintroduce bellbirds to Waiheke Island’, published in Notornis in 2005. The paper explained that 110 bellbirds were released on the island between 1988 and 1991. In late winter 1992, Lee skulked around the island with a playback tape of bellbirds singing. ‘None were seen or heard.’ A more intensive survey was carried out the following spring. ‘None were seen or heard.’ None were seen or heard by anyone on Waiheke by 1993. ‘I note that most people don’t write up their failures,’ Lee remarked in his accompanying letter, ‘which is a pity.’

  There were dead birds. Jenny told of holding a song thrush that crashed into her window and died in her hand. Mites poured out of its feathers, then ran around her hand and up her arm: ‘I dropped that thrush.’ Penny told of the kereru that crashed into her windows with such force that ‘they leave an imprint like a white angel. Must be the oil in their feathers.’ In a sad sequel, she buried the dead birds in her citrus orchard, while a ‘bereft’ mate watched on from a rata tree. In a happy sequel, ‘The resulting oranges are damn fine.’

  Fortunately, there were live birds too. Joan of Tauranga: ‘I knew that adult pukekos have the parrot method of pecking morsels from their foot while standing on one leg, but did you know that they often feed their young in the same manner, extending a foot clutching the food for the baby to help itself?’ Denise of Hawera wrote about the ‘uncountable number’ of starlings roosting at the end of each summer in a belt of poplar trees running the length of her bull paddock: ‘When they arrive in the early evening, they can cast shadows over the house … The next morning at 7 a.m. – you could set your watch by this – they fly out in batches in a south-east direction.’ She added a peculiarly New Zealand gothic touch: ‘I have noticed that they won’t fly over me when I am in the cowshed.’

  More and more birds, live and dead, in more and more correspondence. My thanks to everyone who wrote in – the dozen or so birders, and the 200 or so raw, keen, unornithologised birdwatchers. A special gratitude to Rachel of Takaka, who emailed a short note about observing a flock of shags fly on to the beach from their nests on the Tata Islands. I wrote back with questions. She replied. I wrote back with more questions. She replied again. I found something especially appealing about the notion of those birds in that quiet corner of paradise.

  She wrote, ‘Tata is a small, sheltered beac
h that faces west across Golden Bay. There’s no surf. The beach is on the west side of a slim peninsula, and on the other side there’s a tidal lagoon … The shags assemble at dawn. When they get close to the beach, they fly down, put their feet out in front of them and ski in on the surface of the water. You can hear them land. Usually there are hundreds, and once we estimated there were several thousand packed close together. In small group after small group, they trundle back into the sea…

  ‘Friends went round the islands at Tata in a canoe at Queen’s Birthday weekend this year. One said that she’d been surprised to see the shags had chicks even in the middle of June, and that there were three hawks hovering over the nesting area.’

  The soundless water, the leisurely canoe, the thousands of pied shags on a bird island – this was the acceptable version of New Zealand as birdland. Another, harsher version, marked by slaughter, tradition, work, money and an appalling tragedy, played out that year at the other end of the South Island.

  Young Wandering Albatross about one year old

  To kill a muttonbird

  THE LAST BOAT BACK from the Muttonbird Islands harvest of 2006 was due to tie up at Bluff on a Wednesday afternoon in May. End of the season, the last muttonbird – the sooty shearwater – caught and killed, their salted bodies pickling in their own marinade of blood and oil, packed 20 at a time inside airtight plastic buckets.

  What, said locals, you’ve never eaten a muttonbird? Oh, they said, you don’t know what you’re missing. The knowledge of it brought such pleasure. They beamed. They were thinking of more than just the meal of that boiled, reeking sea bird. It was the whole thing. The hunt, the work involved, the fun of it, the precious time with family on the islands – the tradition. The tradition which led to a tragedy at sea on 13 May, the deaths of six muttonbirders returning from Kaihuka Island, the boat so suddenly and so swiftly punched by freak waves and sunk. The tradition which led to a mass funeral, held on a warm blue day in Bluff, the shops closed ‘due to a bereavement … out of respect … due to events’. The funeral began at 11 a.m. The streets were empty. The town was silent, motionless.

  Five empty hearses drove along Gore Street at 10 a.m. towards the Topi house on Marine Parade to collect the bodies: Shain Topi-Tairi, nine; his cousin Sailor Trow-Topi, also nine; their grandfather, Peter Topi, 78; his daughter Tania Topi, 41. Family friend Clinton Woods, 34. The funeral of Ian Hayward, 52, had been held earlier in the week. The survivors – Paul Topi, 46, Dylan Topi, 16, and the Kotuku’s skipper, John Edminston, 56 – were joined by friends and family from across New Zealand, from around the world. They walked slowly, slowly, to and from the Topi house, cars lined up on both sides of the street, the sea at the doorstep of the Marine Parade house.

  Actually, Bluff faces north, to Invercargill; homes up on the rise, beneath Bluff Hill, have clear views of the city lights at night. Like so many New Zealand harbour towns and cities, Bluff has its back to the sea. One of the best views of Foveaux Strait and Stewart Island is from the old cemetery on Lagan Street. It tells a brief history of Bluff: Bernard Lovett, drowned 1915; Arthur Light-foot, drowned 1913; James Waddel, drowned 1898; Andrew King, drowned 1894; Erasmus Duncan, drowned 1942. The cemetery also features a monument, a rock, dedicated to Bluff’s founder, James Spencer. It reads, ‘Died at sea. 1846.’

  Any history of Bluff is a sea story. Its chapters record fishing tragedies. But what happened on 13 May 2006 was something archaic, singular, unto itself – a birding tragedy, a boat capsized in a notorious stretch of water, bringing death and grief to a corner of New Zealand that harvested sooty shearwaters.

  How strange it was to hear people in Bluff refer to themselves as ‘birders’. This wasn’t the pleasant or obsessive pastime of the white middle-class. This was the seasonal ritual of slaughtering birds. It wasn’t bins and the Field Guide and pious talk of ‘good conservation practices’; it was the fridge and the wringing of necks and pious talk of ‘spiritual ancient practices’. You could say this was the real world, the seafood diet of see food and eat it. This was about birds as food, the moa disappearing into the ‘Black Hole’ theory of the human gob, the Maori harvests – banned in the twentieth century – of snaring tui, kaka and godwit for the pot. Quaintly, in August 2006, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa became patron of the Kereru Discovery Project, launched in an attempt to halt the population decline of the New Zealand pigeon; politely, no one made any reference to the ongoing trapping of the pigeon for food, by Northland Maori in particular.

  Europeans, too, ate their share and more, right from the start. When the Endeavour sailed into Mercury Bay in November 1769, the ship’s naturalist, Joseph Banks, recorded: ‘About 20 birds [pied shags] were soon killed, and soon broiled and eaten, everyone declaring that they were excellent food.’ The introduction to the 1966 Field Guide comments on the colonial devastation of native species: ‘Of course, uncontrolled shooting, based on the philosophy of the inexhaustible, contributed to the general decline. Wekas commonly went into the pot; kakas were esteemed a delicacy; and the pièce de resistance of a bushmen’s feast might be a pig stuffed with native pigeons and tuis. The endemic ducks and plovers and native quail provided a tasty meal for hungry colonists … In the Auckland Islands, shipwrecked mariners probably ate the merganser to the point of extinction.’

  The weather was good that Saturday in May. Boats smaller than the Kotuku trawler were out fishing. The ferry service to Stewart Island carried on as usual. But in the afternoon an ebb tide was running, and when it goes against the wind, that can be bad, very bad – in a strong wind, waves in Foveaux Strait are almost vertical. The wind liable to cause the most damage is a north-wester. It came around that afternoon, blowing maybe 25 or 30 knots, when the Kotuku picked up the Topi family from Kaihuka Island.

  Peter Topi had gone out that morning by helicopter to help his daughter and grandkids off the island. The day before, he was up in Alexandra to attend the opening of a whare at the school. He was a hugely respected man, widely liked. He kept a good home on the island, and another one at Ruapuke Island, once the main Maori settlement in all of Southland, with its seven pas formed by the great chief Tuhawaiki, known as the King of the Bluff.

  You could say that Ruapuke used to function as a centre of government; you could even say that now. Ruapuke Maori control all rights and access to the Muttonbird Islands. They were handed back by the Crown in 1997. Administrative committees were set up, by-laws drafted. This season was the first year that the islands operated under the new regime.

  Morrie Trow, 73, sits on the committee. He wouldn’t discuss the Kotuku tragedy – his brother had lost a grandchild, Sailor Trow-Topi. Neither would he discuss the tally of birds killed on the islands. That particular reticence was common in Bluff. Muttonbirding is a closed shop, not quite a secret society but a matter clearly of nobody else’s business. ‘To have the right to go to the Muttonbird Islands,’ said Trow, ‘you must be a descendant of the original owners of Ruapuke. That’s where you get your rights from. You don’t get your rights because you’re a Maori. You might be a Maori and have lived in Bluff all your life. And your father, and your grandfather. But if your whakapapa doesn’t go back to the original owner, you don’t have the right to go. But I have. It’s a blood thing. It’s probably the last blood thing in this country.’

  The tradition of muttonbirding is unique to Bluff. A unique source – the sooty shearwaters (estimated population, 20 million) make their annual migration from feeding sites in Japan, Alaska or California (at 40,000 miles, it’s the longest migration ever recorded by electronic tracking) to breed only on the islands in the Foveaux. A unique set of customs – only the chicks are taken, either by reaching down into burrows and grabbing them out by hand or by hook, or getting them above ground, at night, when they come out and flap their wings about for the first time. The role of Maori, too, is unique, because the Ruapuke Maori include some of the whitest Maori you’ll ever see.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Trow, ‘the Maoris down here have
lighter skins than any other Maori in the country. They’re no different to any other European in the country.’ Trow looked rather like the actor Lloyd Bridges. His grandfather was a Shetland Islander. ‘My grandmother was a half-caste Maori,’ he said. ‘We believe this is one of the first places in New Zealand that whalers and sealers really got into bed with the Maori. That’s what happened – they got friendly with the wahines, and then you had half-castes running around all over the place.’ So, many Ruapuke Maori were Shetland Island Maori, Portuguese Maori, Norwegian Maori, Scottish Maori, Irish Maori. Their European descendants came to Bluff long before the Treaty of Waitangi – later signed on Ruapuke Island – and set up the town, naming its streets after rivers in Ireland. Trow could date his European ancestors in Bluff back to 1902.

  As well as the tradition – Trow even claimed that muttonbirding was ‘spiritual’ – there is the money. Bluff muttonbirders freeze their catch and have enough to last until Christmas, or later. Many are given away as gifts, and to raffles. But you could ask around town and be told in whispers that most muttonbirds are sold in the North Island. About 250 muttonbirders are on the islands at any one time during the season, which officially opens on 1 May and lasts for less than a month, until the birds take off again on the long migration back to Antarctica.

  It is possible for one person to bag a hundred, even two hundred or more, in a day. One bird fetches about $7. A bucket of 20 costs $170. Boats came back to Bluff with about 400 buckets from an island. As for the costs, there wouldn’t be much change from $10,000 to charter boats and helicopters, and lay down supplies for the time spent on the island. But a good haul of birds might fetch as much as $60,000.

  Private sales? You can get a beautiful feed of blue cod at the Bluff RSA for $14, but there wasn’t a menu anywhere in town selling muttonbirds. You could ask, again in whispers, behind your hand. It might take only as long as the first person you approach. The kindness and generosity of Bluff people is legendary. One man said: I’ll do you one. He said: Put your money away. He said: Happy to.