High Country Lark

by Neville Peat

  ‘These birds are very secretive,’ says Ron. ‘Herbert Guthrie-Smith [Hawke’s Bay pastoralist, author and native bird enthusiast, 1862–1940] organised special expeditions to look for the South Island kōkako on Stewart Island. He was very keen to find and photograph nesting birds. But he failed to see any kōkako, even though they were definitely there in reasonable numbers.’

  Ron is critical of plans by the Department of Conservation to transfer North Island kōkako to Secretary Island in Fiordland. ‘A mistake,’ he says. ‘They’re a different species.’ He is concerned that North Island birds released on Secretary Island might one day interbreed or mix with South Island kōkako, whose identity would then be lost forever.

  Fiordland is one of the target areas for him. In 2008, he planned to follow up a hunter’s report from the Glaisnock wilderness area, west of Lake Te Anau, of an unusual bird call and a glimpse of a grey bird with rounded wings. He also hoped to go back to Big River in the south of Fiordland. In March 2005, Dunedin geologist Ian Turnbull and a colleague, Duncan Ritchie, reported kōkako-like calls, including powerful ‘bong’ calls and dueting, in the trackless upper reaches of the valley. There were kākā in the area but no tūī. Calls came in loud and clear in the early morning and evening. Ian knows Fiordland well. He spent five full summers there remapping the geology of southern Fiordland. The Big River bird calls were unlike anything he had heard before.

  Six Million Dollar Bird

  Pureroa State Forest in the central North Island was the stage for one of New Zealand’s most publicised environmental protests in the 1970s, when defenders of North Island kōkako camped in trees to prevent the loss of habitat. In an outburst against the protest, Prime Minister Rob Muldoon described the kōkako as the Six Million Dollar Bird (an estimate of the value of the timber forsaken to save the Pureora population of kōkako).

  Ron Nilsson checked out the Big River report twice in 2006, and heard the calls on one of the visits. ‘They were mind-boggling,’ he says. He counted about thirty separate calls on the first evening, all of them similar and flute-like. Some of the calls comprised five to seven notes. He never caught sight of the source but he was certain the calls were from at least two birds.

  In 2007, he investigated an angler’s report of a ‘big grey bird’ at the Nina River south of Lewis Pass. Again, he saw no bird. But he did see fresh kōkako-like moss grubbings, four or five metres square. The grubbings were so fresh he thought the bird might have been close by, watching him. ‘I had this eerie feeling.’

  And what if Ron — or fellow searcher Rhys Buckingham — comes home one day with conclusive evidence that his long-lost quarry exists? How legendary would that be? What would he do?

  Ron doesn’t say anything like he’d whoop with delight for a week. No, his response is coolly measured: ‘I’d prepare a scientific report for DOC that would trigger an official investigation and hopefully widen the search. Where there’s one bird, I reckon there might be two or three of them, keeping within calling range. They’re territorial birds, used to keeping in touch.’

  Searching of the Nilsson-Buckingham kind, fiercely determined, reflects the hope of a nation: not one species more of New Zealand’s unique bird life must be allowed to slip into oblivion. Biodiversity loss must be halted, and the dawn chorus restored to at least something like the old order. Ron Nilsson and Rhys Buckingham simply won’t give up.

  The lark has a theory about why South Island kōkako are close to the brink of extinction if not beyond it. He believes that their greater use of beech rather than podocarp forest has increased their exposure to predation from exploding stoat populations during beech seeding years.

  At the Chinaman’s Bluff rock bivvy, perched on wooden beer crates over lunch (remembering Sugarloaf Pass, I brought my own tucker), the Lark and I get down to discussing meatier issues than his mutton sandwiches. He’s had kōkako on his mind since our last meeting. He reckons humans in general and New Zealanders in particular are too blasé about the loss of a species.

  ‘You could argue, “What’s one more bird? There are dozens left.” But it’s not a numbers game.’ He cradles his enamel mug of tea in both hands and rocks back on the beer crate. ‘Take a species like South Island kōkako. In looks and in voice, it’s a thing of beauty. There’s an extraordinary vitality to it that somehow increases the forest’s spiritual energy. No question, the forest is sadder without kōkako.’

  I relate the story of the Keens and their friends hearing something like a kōkako call around Chinaman’s Bluff, and how the call alone — even without a sighting of the bird — remains embedded in their memory twenty years on. Sipping now from the tannin-stained mug, the Lark is contemplative: ‘If it’s still around in this here neck of the woods it’d be pretty darned lonely. More chance looking round Fiordland or Westland.’

  ‘I know people who are doing just that,’ I say. ‘Do you get over the Divide yourself much?’

  ‘Nope, plenty of bush and mountains to amuse me here,’ says my friend. ‘I like being handy to the farming, too. Mountainous places like the country beyond Chinaman’s Bluff were impossible to farm so they got turned into national park. Suits me, I can have the wilds and the farms in the same package.’

  ‘What about other services? I mean, don’t you ever need a doctor?’

  ‘Hardly. I can sometimes do with a bit of dental treatment, though. Out at Queenstown.’

  He goes on to relate a story from his years here on holiday in the ’fifties. It was Easter. A scheelite miner needed to have a tooth extracted. Urgently. With no road to Queenstown, no boat for a couple of days and no small planes flying from the airstrip near Blanket Bay because of bad weather, the miner invited a mate of his to do the extraction. First, the would-be dentist placed the miner’s head between his knees, then he took a small wedge of wood and a hammer and whacked the tooth out in one hit.

  ‘Miners were made of tough stuff,’ says the Lark.

  I am thinking of Bill O’Leary now, of his single-minded grittiness and how he saw the hills and mountains out west being just as capable of producing income and wealth — mineral wealth — as the farms. Arawata Bill spanned two centuries and topped four score years. The Lark is also spanning two centuries but will he live as long? I ask him whether he might ever consider moving to town — in his dotage, so to speak. Dumb question.

  In a voice rising contemptuously, he says: ‘Me, find a council flat in town or a pensioner cottage?’ He shifts nervously on the beer crate and gazes out at the forest interior, where nothing moves and the dank air is bereft of birdsong, perhaps because it’s close to the middle of the day and the bush birds are taking a siesta. ‘In town, the horizon shrinks. No, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle before I see the inside of a council flat. The world’s overpopulated enough without being reminded of it every day in town. Anyway, where are you headed?’

  I tell him about my plans for a book about the Tasman Sea, the ultimate western horizon for a New Zealander.

  ‘You’ll be getting in deep there.’

  ‘New territory for sure,’ I say. I tell him I’m the kind of writer who serves an apprenticeship with each new project, feeling my way naively with inexperienced eyes. It’s as if, as American writer Barry Lopez says, you apply for the position then go on to seek tutoring from people who are always going to know more than you. The trick is to leave behind old perceptions, be open to the tutoring.

  ‘Compared to a region of mountains, valleys, rivers and lakes,’ I say, ‘the sea is a bit nebulous. For most of us there is no sense of place beyond the breakers, no genius loci.’

  ‘Yeah, but I reckon a sea lion or a selchie would have a sense of place.’ His pale-blue eyes narrow and his jaw tenses, exaggerating the ginger stubble. ‘Today I bet they’d also see disturbance where they live, much of it caused by humans. Trouble is, humans are far too clever for their own good — too invasive of nature. Isn’t it ironic? The more we know about the fabric of nature, the less secure we are. Knowledge is a dang
erous thing, as they say. Those things we cannot understand we should let be. Make peace with them. Allow them their mystery.’

  Pondering this on my way back from the Chinaman’s Bluff rock shelter, I stop to take a picture of the wheel tracks disappearing abruptly into the Dart River. But my new digital camera — a rugged, intelligent, no-nonsense Canon 30D — is jammed. Its LCD screen signals a problem with the two-gigabyte memory card that stores the images, the ones I’ve taken at the Lark’s lair and earlier. Back at Glenorchy and in cell-phone range once more, I contact Jonathan’s Camera and Video store in George Street, which sold me the camera. Jonathan himself tells me not to worry; just bring it in when I get back. Images from a corrupted card can usually be recovered.

  Next day, I take in the camera with its bung card. The staff are astonished to discover they cannot recover any of the images. The corruption is terminal and highly unusual. They pronounce the camera in good nick and replace the $200 card. The failure of the card is a technical mystery. This is not the kind of mystery of which the Lark speaks. His mysteries apply to nature.

  Images of him nag me. He seems to disappear for long periods. Bill O’Leary would do the same from time to time. In May 1929, aged sixty-three, Bill was reported missing in the Upper Arawhata Valley of South Westland, a long way from anywhere. He turned up at Okuru, south of Haast, a couple of months later, no doubt puzzled by the concern for his safety. Poet Denis Glover turned this and other tales of the veteran prospector into a sequence of twenty poems called Arawata Bill, which he published five years after Bill died. In the process he helped create a legend. The Arawata Bill poems were put to music by Les Cleveland, distributed as a long-play record, broadcast on national radio and in recent times turned into a dramatised DVD, produced by Riverton-based filmmaker Dave Asher and featuring outdoorsman Mike Bennett in the role of the legendary loner.

  Denis Glover admitted that he juggled the facts of Bill O’Leary’s life to suit his theme of an eccentric mountain rambler facing the elements alone, without fixed abode or worldly possessions beyond those he could pack on a horse. His Arawata Bill craved a simple life in the back of beyond, unencumbered by urban issues and driven by the prospect of a mineral windfall in the next valley or around the next corner.

  Wrote Glover in conclusion: ‘You should have been told/Only in you was the gold;/Mountain and river paid no fee,/Mountain melting to the river,/River to the sea.’

  The Lark is different yet the same, finding fulfilment in the outdoors but not in pursuit of precious metals. He gets his buzz from the landscape, where he is as agile as a falcon and thoroughly tuned in to its natural rhythms, happy as the proverbial lark. As I write this, I can hear the singing strings of English composer Vaughan Williams’s landmark The Lark Ascending, rising, falling, rising again, a metaphor of optimism and what poet George Meredith, whose work inspired Williams, called ‘a silver chain of sound … ’tis love of earth that he instils’.

  I meant to ask the Lark back at Chinaman’s Bluff whether he ever worried about getting caught up in the middle of a catastrophic earthquake, of the magnitude predicted for the southern New Zealand region in the twenty-first century — in fact, any day now. A Magnitude 8 rupture somewhere along the Alpine Fault would, at the surface, displace the land horizontally by eight to ten metres and vertically by two to four. If the centre of the quake were anywhere near South Westland, where the fault-line’s surface trace can be seen from the air angling towards the Fiordland coast, all hell would break loose around the Head of the Lake.

  Picture the Lark holed up in a rock bivvy with the mountainsides around him crashing and sliding, and his shelter collapsing, entombing him. Would he worry about meeting such an end, this man of the land? I doubt it.

  Appendices

  South Island Kōkako

  Callaeas cinerea

  Orange-wattled crow, organ-bird, gillbird, kōka

  The South Island kōkako belongs to a unique avian family — the New Zealand wattle birds, formally called Callaeatidae. Its cousins are the huia, a North Island species that became extinct around 1907, and the North Island and South Island saddlebacks.

  In a taxonomic review in 2001, paleoecologists Richard Holdaway and Trevor Worthy identified the South Island kōkako as Callaeas cinerea, a species separate from its North Island relative and known in some southern areas in pre-European times as kōka. Callaeas is a generic Greek word for cock’s wattles, and cinerea means ash-grey. The bird was described scientifically from a specimen collected in Queen Charlotte Sound by Captain James Cook’s 1777 expedition, decades before the North Island bird was formally described and named.

  In the late nineteenth century, the two kōkako were described by Sir Walter Buller in his landmark book on New Zealand’s birds as separate species. Later they were deemed to be more closely related and formally described as subspecies.

  They continue to be distinguished mainly by the colour of their wattles: lapis-lazuli blue for the North Island bird, deep orange for the South Islander. Researchers are now less certain, however, that wattle colours are separated by Cook Strait. Touches of orange appear in North Island birds, and blue is known to appear with the orange wattles of the South Island species (the orange wattles commonly have a blue base or spots). Perhaps wattle colouring changes with age. The wattles swell in the breeding season and the sexes are difficult to tell apart.

  In January 2007, the Department of Conservation in Wellington proclaimed the species extinct when it published a triennial review of the status of New Zealand native fauna and flora — the New Zealand Threat Classification System Lists 2005. With this review New Zealand’s unenviable list of extinct species increased by seven — six invertebrate animals (three snails, two beetles and a weevil) and the South Island kōkako, ‘for which there have been no confirmed sightings for 45 years’. This, said the report, was ‘despite searching’. Thus the South Island kōkako became the sixteenth bird to be declared extinct since 1840.

  Support for the Department’s position came from the Ornithological Society of New Zealand’s Atlas of Bird Distribution in New Zealand 1999–2004, published in 2007.

  The atlas is silent on South Island kōkako, declaring there were no records for the focus years of the survey.

  In pre-human times, the species was widely distributed across the South Island and Stewart Island. Sightings ranged from seashore forest edges to high-altitude forest.

  The entire western side of the South Island from Northwest Nelson to Fiordland was a stronghold for the kōkako but it was also found in patches of southeast coastal forest, from Dunedin to the Catlins. The Mount Cargill forest overlooking Otago Harbour had ‘very plentiful’ numbers, according to Otago geologist James Hector. There were reports also from Banks Peninsula.

  In the South Island, the kōkako was still fairly common in the 1870s. But from then, it began disappearing at a rapid rate.

  Why did no one take the initiative twenty to fifty years ago, when the species was obviously struggling to survive, to intensely search for and protect South Island kōkako? Future ornithologists may well ask that question. Possible answers: perhaps the existence, even if threatened, of the similar North Island kōkako detracted from any action being taken back then. Perhaps the mission looked altogether too hard and laborious. Perhaps officialdom thought it was a lost cause.

  Meanwhile, the reports still come in of presumed kōkako calls and observations, from Fiordland, the West Coast and the Murchison area, and the searching continues. It will not be stilled by the label of extinction applied by the Department of Conservation in 2007.

  Doomed? Maybe. Extinct? Not yet.

  The Day the Lake Came to Town

  In mid-November 1999, I was heading to the Head of the Lake with my wife, Mary, for a tramp in the Caples Valley. The Caples is one of the main valleys on the remote northwestern side of Lake Wakatipu. You loop around Queenstown, Glenorchy and Kinloch to get there. It is always an expedition, never a day trip. You go for the trampin
g, fly-fishing or bird-watching. In the late 1990s, developers with an eye on short-cutting the Queenstown-Milford Sound experience proposed a gondola development linking the upper reaches of the valley to the Milford highway in the Hollyford, across the Main Divide. At the news of the proposal, ‘Gondola Be Gone’ bumper stickers blossomed all over southern New Zealand.

  We got as far as Queenstown on that trip. It was raining — heavy, unrelenting rain. We checked into the Gardens Parkroyal Hotel near the lake shore in Queenstown Bay. I requested a room with a view over the lake, hopeful of a scenic sunrise. That evening we ate at a restaurant on the Steamer Wharf, where lake water was lapping the deck timbers. The atmosphere inside the restaurant equated to that of a sinking ship. At the entrance, as if to reinforce the analogy, was a showpiece rowboat sitting up on its stern.

  Through the night, curious gurgling sounds emanated from the bathroom. They took on a progressively higher pitch as the night wore on. In the morning I looked out towards the lake to see a man making his way slowly towards the historic 1911 Coronation Bath House, now a café, on the gravel foreshore. He was moving slowly because he was wading through water waist-deep and curry-brown from the deluge flowing past the hotel. Horne Creek, normally a bubbling brook, had become an enraged torrent. We decided to sit tight. At 11.45 a.m., a hotel porter arrived at the door, warning us not to flush the toilet. Ten minutes later, we were ordered to evacuate. Lake and creek water were threatening the hotel entrance.

  This flood was huge. Queenstown was cut off by landslips, the airport closed. There was no chance of getting to Glenorchy let alone Kinloch and the Greenstone-Caples carpark. The following day the Otago Daily Times reported a flood exceeding the level of the infamous 1878 flood. Kayakers were paddling around the lower part of Queenstown’s retail area, and I saw a ‘No Parking’ sign still attached to its white pole floating out of Queenstown Bay, the jetties under water, bench seats in St Omer Park half submerged and the park’s weeping willows having plenty to cry about, with their lowest branches well immersed in lake water.