How to Watch a Bird

by Steve Braunias

  They said in Bluff: ‘People are as welcome here as flowers in May.’ Unless they came for the wrong reasons. The story of small New Zealand towns is told in pride; resentment comes when visitors are attracted by tragedy. It was one thing for the walls of the pubs to be covered in heroic photographs of boats riding enormous waves, and for murals to depict romantic shipwrecks of old (the Scotia, the Okta, the Maid of Otago). But the loss of six people, two of them children, was too recent, too private.

  Too awful. There was a bit of a slop in the sea that afternoon. A swell. Everyone had seen worse. But a freak wave is exactly that: freak, no warning.

  It would have been fast. The two waves that hit the Kotuku would have arrived right on top of each other. A minute? Probably 30 seconds. Not enough time to do anything, to grab life-jackets, to hit the radio. The first wave rocking the boat to the side, taking on God knows how much weight of water, the second wave finishing it off.

  That was at about 2.30 p.m. No one knew anything had happened until crew on the regular 5 p.m. Stewart Island ferry spotted buckets of muttonbirds floating in the water. The alarms sounded, search parties set out. It got dark. The big floodlights on the Stewart Island wharf were turned on. It didn’t rain; it pissed down. It wasn’t cold, it was freezing – for searchers out all night looking for bodies, it took them all the next day to thaw out.

  Paul and Dylan Topi made the swim to Womens Island. A muttonbirder on that island had only just left for the season the day before; he could maybe have seen the Kotuku go down from his kitchen window. But there wasn’t anyone around any more to help. Topi signalled an SOS on a torch. That was picked up, but he also wrapped rags around a branch, and lit it using kerosene he found in a hut. As well, he lit a fire on the ground.

  Along with Edminston, the skipper, who had made it to the beach, they were picked up by helicopter and taken to hospital in Invercargill. It was too late for Woods. He had tried to find shelter; his body was found halfway up a cliff. Six dead. Three alive. Two funerals.

  Maybe there’s something in all that muttonbird oil, in its special pickle. At 73, Morrie Trow moved like a young buck, and his hair was full and thick; at 90, Harold Ashwell was as fit as any number of fiddles, his hearing unimpaired, everything in working order, and his stated aim was to go back out muttonbirding next season.

  He talked about what you do once the bird is killed. ‘First, you pluck them, and then heat-wax them to get rid of all the down. We used to boil them to do that, but waxing leaves a cleaner article. The head is offal. That’s turfed. There was a time when the wings and hearts were kept, but not any more. Then you hang the bird, for at least 12 hours, and then slice it down the middle, and take its guts out, and dry-salt by hand – salting is an art in itself. You need only a fine coating of salt.

  ‘Birding is like any sport – it gets in the blood, and you just can’t stop. I love the islands. Everybody takes their families. We’ve taken our granddaughter when she was only ten days old. It’s a good, healthy spot. No one ever catches the cold or anything like that. It’s much warmer there than it is here. They tell us a warm current comes down from Australia and sweeps past the islands. I can believe it. At Christmas, you’d think it had snowed – all the trees flower, and there are so many white flowers that it’s like a dusting on the island.’

  He said his family had been birding since 1826: ‘We’re descendants of half-castes, really.’ Originally, he said, muttonbirds were taken as food for winter for the family. And now? Oh, he didn’t know what other people did with the birds.

  Trow said, ‘The demand far outstrips the supply.’ This year wasn’t a great season, he said. The birds were too skinny; when they eventually fattened up, the moon came out, and the birds stayed inside their burrows. ‘Some seasons, the birds stay so skinny that when they leave, they’re that sick and sorry, the first bit of bad weather they run into, they can’t take it. You pick them up on the beach. This year you won’t.

  ‘This year, millions of healthy birds will have left the island. We already know we have sent away a beautiful bunch of birds. Next season,’ he said, ‘should be a great season for muttonbirding.’

  Downy Bittern chicks in the nest, Papatoetoe, 18.12.38

  Rare blue chicken

  TWITCHING IS THE new hunting. It’s a genuine sport, with only a vague set of rules but a clear, ruthless purpose: to find as many rare or unusual bird species as possible. It’s a genuine challenge – you have to act fast on information, and be prepared to travel a long way to an obscure patch of land. Time is limited, birds don’t sit still. Numbers are everything. Scores are marked by lists – a year list, a life list, a world list, a national list, et cetera.

  It’s getting huge in Australia (a record 350 birders recently travelled vast distances to twitch a grey-headed lapwing that should have been in Thailand). It’s already huge in Britain (one of the most famous twitches in UK birding history was in 1989, when 5000 twitchers descended on a supermarket car park in Kent to see the golden-winged warbler making its first appearance in Europe). And in America it’s… very American, which is to say overblown, an epic enterprise, a whole continent to conquer, with events like the five-day Great Texas Birding Classic held in April, as well as the annual sea-to-shining-sea Big Year.

  Overblown, maybe, but American twitching is high end. A former record holder, Kenn Kaufman, described attending a speech by the great American birder Roger Tory Peterson thus: ‘Listening, I realised he might have been any kind of artist. He might have been a composer, the great composer who began as a youth and learned to play all the instruments, who studies the intricacies of music theory, searching for musical perfection … until he could sit down at the piano and improvise so brilliantly that every measure of music rolling forth from the keys would be an inspiration to the listener. So it was with Peterson, only it was birds, not music. Since his boyhood he had been watching birds, painting them, photographing them, writing about them, letting his quest for birds take him to all parts of the globe; now he could hold a room full of birders spellbound simply by reminiscing, by improvising. When it was over we would all be on our feet, rocking the room with applause – but while he spoke, no one made a sound.’

  There are signs that twitching is the next big thing waiting to happen in New Zealand. Right now, it’s the slowest next big thing. The record twitch so far attracted only about 20 birders – when an Australian reed warbler was at St Anne’s Lagoon near Cheviot. I asked the man who is often described by birders as ‘New Zealand’s arch twitcher’, Sav Saville of Feilding, how many serious twitchers there were here. ‘I could count them on the fingers of one hand,’ he said.

  Four or five in the whole country! Twitching is a lonely business in New Zealand; the superbly named Robin Bush, who emigrated here from England (and whose bird photography is so good that OS members give him the ultimate accolade of saying he’s ‘another Geoff Moon’), talked to me about missing the camaraderie he was used to among twitchers back home.

  Sav said, ‘I can guarantee it will change. I just can’t see it not happening.’ This was partly said out of self-interest. Sav has a day job: it sounds like he’s making it up, but he really is an air-force pilot. He has also created Wrybill Tours, which runs birding expeditions up and down the country. In fact, the first time I met Sav was last summer on the beach at Gisborne, when I was on my romantic East Coast trip with Emily, and saw a four-wheel drive marked WRYBILL TOURS. That car has done some considerable mileage in his quest for birds. Wrybill Tours operates pelagic tours – the Hauraki Gulf, the East Cape – in search of sea birds, as well as national tours of shore, forest and island, attracting international birders and hard-core twitchers on intense three-week trips.

  As a destination, New Zealand is increasingly becoming a must-see birding hot spot, with British, European and United States birder companies raking in good money to bring twitchers our way. Sav: ‘I looked at their itineraries and what they were achieving and realised we could do it much better
from here. They just didn’t know what they were talking about, really.’ He set up Wrybill Tours with birding colleague Brent Stephenson in 2003, and figured it would take five years to generate any real business. ‘But it took off like a mad thing. We made a small financial profit in the first year, and it’s just gone completely weird. Turnover is approaching $100,000 this year.’

  What’s the appeal? Why come here to look at birds? You can see a greater, far more dazzling variety in other parts of the world. A fellow called Gunnar posted an email on Sav’s newsgroup BIRDING-NZ, happily twittering on about seeing 500 species on a 12-day birding trip in Peru. It drew this very New Zealand response from a subscriber: ‘Can someone please explain to me why anyone wants to see 500 bird species in 12 days? I have a big enough job finding, identifying, learning and remembering 150 Australian species in one holiday. I am totally exhausted by that number. Five hundred would be like ships passing in the night. At the end of it all would be only a dream, lost to the world of oblivion. I won’t be going to Peru – that’s for sure.’

  Never mind the width, feel the quality. New Zealand has what Sav called ‘high-quality birds’. He meant the species belonging to three bird families unique to New Zealand. First, and most obvious, the kiwis. Then the wattle birds – kokako, saddleback. And then the wrens – rifleman and rock wren. Nothing like them anywhere, and we also have birds only unto New Zealand (kea, kakapo, takahe, wrybill…).

  How to watch a unique bird? The groundwork is in place. There are several other birding tour companies in New Zealand, including Manu, Driftwood, Kahurangi, and Kiwi Wildlife, plus localised tours to sanctuaries at Tiritiri Matangi Island, Kapiti Island, Mount Bruce, the white heron colony at Okarito, and albatrosses at Kaikoura and Taiaroa Head. As well, Greytown in the Wairarapa has a world-class birds store and gift shop, offering some magnificent antique prints – the US$350 print by nineteenth-century illustrator Frederick Nodder of the brown kiwi, gormless and impossibly upright, has to be seen to be disbelieved.

  Now living in Tabor, Iowa, New Zealand birder Ross Silcock operates birding tours back home every two years – a 30-day blitz, including Stewart Island and Chatham Island, at US$7200 a head. He knows his stuff – the last trip, in 2005, clocked 162 bird species. By email, he wrote, ‘My groups are a mixed bag. There is always a really gung-ho twitcher who wants to keep moving to the next spot, and gets upset if we miss any of the endemic birds.’

  That reminded me of a story I heard from John Gale, former president of the Miranda Naturalists Trust. He picked up a Texan twitcher at Auckland airport, and drove him to Miranda. The twitcher had a sole purpose: he wanted to add a wrybill to his world list. The bird duly appeared. ‘Aha,’ said the twitcher, put a tick on his list, got John to confirm the sighting, and then showed no further interest in the wrybill. Or in any other of the thousands of birds at the shore that day. He’d seen those species in other parts of the world. They weren’t on his list. Really, they didn’t exist.

  This is what makes true twitchers such rogues within the birding community – they’re a rebel sect, wanting only to add to their precious, obsessive count. Not for these fellows – they’re almost always men – the careful ornithological study, the useful activity (banding, beach patrols), the conservation effort. Those activities are strictly for the birders. And yet most birders are also closet twitchers. That day I was at Tupora in the Kaipara Harbour with Ian Southey, unseen by either of us responsible birder Phil Hammond was there too, guiltily relying on a tape recording of a fernbird to attract that secretive wetland bird his way. It worked, and the next weekend he was on an island in the Far North, twitching the nankeen kestrel, an uncommon Australian vagrant.

  Wrybill Tours are keeping a record of birders with highest life lists of New Zealand species. Sav has 232 species, his wrybill partner Brent Stephenson 237. High scores were also reached by twitchers from other lands – Britain, Australia, the United States, South Africa, Canada, Germany, Holland. In second place, on 261: Colin Miskelly of the Department of Conservation. Top of the table: former Wildlife Service ranger and veteran OS regional representative, Brian Bell, who has 263 species.

  When I spoke to Sav in August, he was making confident noises about being the first birder to score 200 in his year list. In the end, he was beaten by Stephenson, who counted 206, the last being a kookaburra in the Leigh Marine Reserve car park.

  Well, you know what they say about records: they’re there to be broken, toppled, smashed. What rough beast, slouching towards the brolga (an extremely rare Australian crane), is due to launch a challenge? Will anyone rise above the 300 life list, or more than 250 in one calendar year? The sky, obviously, is the limit.

  As well as the native population to count and conquer, twitchers need to keep on their toes for visiting, or vagrant, birds. Birds from Australia, or Arctic waders caught up in other flocks – the lost, the windswept, the confused, the simply curious, the passengers who have hitched a ride on container ships. (Sometimes as stowaways on aircraft: Graham Turbott and Brian Gill looked into two cases of mangled barn owls that arrived in Auckland on international flights, the first dropping from the wheels and found by schoolgirl Sharon Richardson at Flat Bush School in 1983, the second almost exactly one year later in the undercarriage of Continental Airlines Flight C01 arriving from Los Angeles via Honolulu.)

  BIRDING-NZ keeps subscribers informed of rare sightings. In 2006, messages included sightings of a single white heron at the Te Marua reservoir in Upper Hutt and another at the Waiatarua Reserve in Auckland (‘Truly amazing… why aren’t people talking about this?’), an unidentified Australian crane (either sarus or brolga) circling Moetapu Bay in Marlborough Sounds, a Japanese snipe at Forest Lake in Hamilton, a black kite near Renwick in Blenheim, eight cattle egrets on a dairy farm in Foxton, a long-wintering Hudsonian godwit at Miranda, and a glossy ibis wandering from Blenheim south to Christchurch.

  There was also a white ibis, that extraordinary black-headed, white-plumed bird so common as a scavenger in the city parks of Sydney, sighted at Haast. This led to a raging debate about the Department of Conservation. DOC staff, who were first to spot the rare bird, were accused, then defended, of ‘failing to disclose’ the sighting to New Zealand’s birders and twitchers. Comment from the anti-DOC side: ‘Didn’t you know that DOC has always had exclusive and confidential rights to New Zealand’s biota, and to most of its land too? It’s only when they’re short of cash … that they break out with generosity.’

  And so the ibis had unwittingly provoked a question – whose bird is it anyway? – which is bound to play itself out more and more in New Zealand’s nascent twitching scene. The Department of Conservation is often viewed as the great killjoy of modern New Zealand life. The point of twitching is to go wherever there’s a chance to sight a rare bird. It’s false to say that armed combat awaits. But it’s true to say that the pro- and anti-DOC factions settled on an uneasy truce on BIRDING-NZ.

  Mostly, though, twitching here is marked by typical New Zealand amiability. There’s an annual Twitchathon – teams have 24 hours, any day of the year, to rack up the highest count. The record is held by Ken Bond and Ted Wnorowski, who in 2006 sighted 100 New Zealand bird species in one day. Impressive. They covered a lot of ground. And it helped that they stayed overnight at the bird sanctuary on Tiritiri Matangi Island. This is what is known as twitching sitting ducks.

  But almost every twitcher goes to Tiri. It’s a fabulous place, beautifully restored, a masterpiece of conservation and preservation, and the star attraction is that near-mythical New Zealand bird brought back from beyond the grave – the takahe. I went to Tiri on a lovely day in August, walked along tracks through spectacular native bush, and happily saw saddlebacks, stitchbirds, tui, bellbirds, fantails, kokako, North Island robins, whiteheads, red-crowned parakeets, and a pair of rare endemic brown teal, which slept in the sunshine by a pond, exactly like sitting ducks. Personal highlight? Takahe. Every New Zealander ought to see this bird. It’s our super
star, our greatest survivor. It should be as celebrated as the kiwi.

  The takahe came back from the grave not once, but twice. It was a food source for Maori at the same time as the moa, but the first that Europeans even knew it existed was when moa bones were discovered. When Richard Owen at the British Museum identified the moa in 1839, it caused a sensation. New Zealand collector Walter Mantell duly sent over crates of more bones, which included a shipment of a skull, bill and other parts of a skeleton of a different and unknown bird. Owen went to work, and was able to announce he had found another new species – the takahe.

  It was assumed the bird had gone the way of the moa, and was extinct. But two years later, in 1849, Mantell bought a fresh takahe skin from sealers. They had followed the trail of a large bird in the snow in Dusky Bay: ‘It ran with great speed, and upon being captured uttered loud screams, and fought and struggled violently; it was kept alive three or four days onboard the schooner and then killed, and the body roasted and ate by the crew, each partaking of the delicacy, which was declared to be delicious.’

  Three more birds were caught and killed in the next few years. One ended up on Walter Buller’s desk. Graham Turbott excised the following passage, which had appeared in the original 1883 volume of Buller’s Birds, from his 1967 edition: ‘On being introduced to this rara avis I experienced once again the old calm that always came over me when gazing upon the two examples in the British Museum – the lingering representative of a race coexistent in this land with the colossal moa! Then, retiring to the library, I shut myself in with the Notornis [Southern Bird], and handled my specimen with the loving tenderness of the naturalist.’