Wild Journeys

by Bruce Ansley

  In 2017 Emirates Team New Zealand won the America’s Cup. The triumphant sailors were to parade down Queen Street. The day was wintery-cold, but flashes of sunlight fell upon the young mariners, raising the god quotient. The parade started just off the top end of Queen Street, every carload of yachties hosted regally by an Emirates flight attendant. All the brass bands in the land seemed to have been summoned for the event, and pipe bands too. Drums thumped, pipes howled and euphoniums honked. The light bounced off instruments big as suns. If there’d been a lesser event this day, say a coronation, or a state funeral, it would have been grievously short of musical instruments.

  Marching girls strutted, people dressed as sailors danced hornpipes, gymnasts cavorted, flags waved everywhere and, as car horns howled, our heroes set forth amid a forest of uplifted phones and a thousand, ten thousand, selfies jammed the ether.

  Leading the parade were Peter Burling and Glenn Ashby. Ashby, to the great confusion of the non-sailing crowd, since he never took the wheel, was skipper. Burling, whom most people thought was skipper, was in fact helmsman.

  A mere technicality. Burling was a hero in the Hillary mould: tall, angular, long lean face split by a crevasse of a grin. The two of them, and Grant Dalton, the boss, took turns hoisting the cup aloft, and they needed all their fitness training to do it. The rich boys, the men who made the whole thing possible, waved too, and I daresay they deserved their share of the glory given the Olympian nature of the cheques they’d written.

  Down Queen Street they went, the crowd growing by the minute: 50,000, 100,000, who was counting? ‘Woo-woo-woo,’ they went.

  A woman dressed in a flag strutted a matching poodle. Even the Queen Street homeless looked elated. On to the Viaduct, the rain pouring down now, everyone drenched and no one caring, waka lined up stern as a naval parade, warriors bailing. A fleet of pleasure boats clustered outside, more than were ever seen at the Bermuda contest, according to one commentator. I had no reliable count, but my impression was that more police turned out for the yachties than the trade protest. Certainly they looked happier.

  The old KZ1 hung over the affair like an artefact, although its story was just as dramatic. That yacht challenged for the 1988 America’s Cup. The Americans responded with a catamaran. It won the races and the court battle which followed. Ah, those were the days. KZ1 was made of carbon fibre and Kevlar sandwich. It was state of the art. Now it was a dinosaur, a relic of this rich man’s sport. But who’d say anything like that, on this day of days?

  I abandoned the cyclors for the commutors. I wrung a gallon or two of rainwater from my heavy woollen coat and caught the ferry back home.

  Now, that was a demonstration. Of what, I’m still not sure. The age of dissent has its followers; evidently the age of consent has many more.

  8

  Hunting ghosts

  One fine weekend I arrange to meet Rhys Buckingham in South Westland to search for the country’s most elusive bird.

  It seems simple enough, except that phrases such as ‘fine weekend’ and ‘South Westland’ do not sit easily with each other. The weather office might think the weekend will be fine, but South Westland has other ideas. Or vice versa.

  Worse, the ‘country’s most elusive bird’ has eluded its putative hunters for years and is unlikely to make an exception for a visiting writer. Does the bird exist? Am I instead searching for Rhys Buckingham, who is almost as cryptic as his bird?

  Cryptic. My dictionary defines it as ‘secret, mystic, mysterious’. Zoologists use it to describe an animal so anonymous in its colourings, so careful in its proceedings, that it is all but invisible. Ghost-like, in other words.

  All of this describes the South Island kokako, as much as it can be described, for the bird is usually no more than a shadow, a wish in the deep green bush. It has earned the title ‘Grey Ghost’.

  The list of extinct New Zealand birds is long and ignoble. It runs from the huia to the Haast’s eagle, from false-toothed pelicans to the New Zealand lake-wanderer, from nineteen species of penguins to all nine species of moa. We are not good with birds.

  The South Island kokako was another victim of habitat loss and predators. It was declared extinct too, for a few years, until the various bird authorities decided they might have been a little fast off the mark and improved its official status, marginally.

  Everyone has heard the kokako’s call, although they may not know it. It is that deep, melodic, lonely, haunting note that so often introduces a tale of the New Zealand bush. Without it the song of the forest is lighter, like an orchestra missing its bassoon.

  Rhys Buckingham heard it first forty years before, in the 1970s. This is what he says about that: ‘I heard the most amazing call, at the head of Lake Monowai. It was right on nightfall. It was the most beautiful, bell-like tolling. It has never gone out of my mind. It went for some time and then it stopped and after it stopped I could hear it still in my ear.’

  In his soul too, I suspect.

  I listen on NZ Birds Online to the kokako’s calls he has recorded over the years (listed as ‘possible calls’), then to recordings of the North Island kokako: a long clear pipe, an organ-like mwonngg; joyous, tragic, tremendously moving, the magical calls of sirens luring voyagers onto the rocks.

  The nineteenth-century South Westland adventurer Charlie ‘Mr Explorer’ Douglas, who called the kokako the ‘New Zealand crow’ and wrote of them running around his camp in dozens, found the call ‘indiscribably mournfull’ [sic]:

  The wail of the wind through a leafless forest is cheerful compared to it . . . sadly suggestive of departed spirits . . . It is only in the depths of the forest they can be heard to perfection. Their notes are very few, but are the sweetest and most mellow toned I have ever heard a bird produce. When singing they cast their eyes upwards like a street musician expecting coppers from a fourth story window, and pour forth three or four notes, softer and sweeter than an acolian harp or a well-toned clarionet.

  The voyage hasn’t wrecked Rhys Buckingham, yet. I think of him more as a knight-errant on a quest that began a very long time ago.

  He calls himself an ecologist, primarily. He has worked, often on threatened species, for the old Wildlife Service, the former Forest Service, early versions of the Department of Conservation. Now he works with clients who need resource consents. That’s his job, he says, although I suspect that if he could bill someone for all the hours he has put into the South Island kokako he’d be a very rich man.

  He is seventy. He wears a pair of shorts he calls lichen-coloured; to my mind they’re baggy khaki, without the pith helmet. I haven’t seen him for more than a decade, but he certainly doesn’t look ten years older. He is charitable about my own advancing years but tells me with just a hint of glee that buying petrol the other day he produced his SuperGold card for a discount and the cashier asked him for additional proof of identity.

  I think of him as Tantalus, who in Greek mythology stood in a pool forever, fruit dangling over his head but always out of reach, the water below running away before he could drink it. But he isn’t simply tantalised by the kokako — he is tormented by it. He is part of an ornithological galaxy but in an orbit of his own.

  In 1980 he was working for what was then the Forest Service on Stewart Island. His boss was a senior protection ranger, Max Kershaw. (He has a thicket of names, ornithologists, environmentalists, supporters. Some he approves of; some — for the same arguments and jealousies seethe here as in any ardent group — he puts in the same category as, say, a bush lawyer.)

  ‘He was a wonderful man,’ Rhys says of Kershaw. ‘He leaked to me one day that he’d found a population of kokako, at least a dozen of them, on Stewart Island and he wasn’t telling anybody. He thought Lands and Survey and the Wildlife Service [whose conservation duties were later subsumed by the Department of Conservation] were destroying our wildlife. That’s how it started.’

  The South Island kokako was then officially extinct and had been since 1967, the last c
onfirmed sighting.

  Kershaw never said where he’d found the birds but hinted at the Ruggedy Range running along the north-western rim of Stewart Island, around the upper reaches of the Freshwater River. Or they might be somewhere else. He wouldn’t be exact.

  Rhys determined to find them. He knew it would be hard. He took with him recorded contact calls of the North Island kokako to play in the hope that the kokako would respond. But here’s something else about kokako: they have their own accents. Their dialects change. They can tell the difference, just as a Coaster can pick someone from Queen Street (or vice versa). They won’t answer unless they’re spoken to in their own vernacular, just like a Coaster. The North Island bird’s call ticks up at the end, while the southern kokako’s continues its melancholy glide.

  Rhys has put much effort into understanding the complex encyclopaedia of sound within the forest. After thirty-eight years, he says, he has managed to interpret a very small facet of it.

  He searched the river, the range, the Rakeahua River running around the base of Mount Rakeahua into South West Arm. He found a valley where he thought, or believed, there were at least three birds, hearing birds without seeing them, and realising their nature: South Island kokako were ethereal. The legend of the Grey Ghost took flight.

  He and a companion were up at four in the morning, squirming through the bush and the undergrowth, working through streams and ravines to their sites, right through to eleven at night. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘we worked so hard, we’d get up in the morning after we’d been there for a week and we could hardly walk, we were falling over, because we were hypnotised by this amazing bird.’

  He made a discovery that was to become a mainstay of his quest for the next four decades: in the Mount Anglem branch of the Freshwater River he found a peculiar kind of moss-grubbing — chunks of moss dug out in definite shapes and left intact. As his search developed he was to recognise moss-grubbing as a prime clue to the existence of kokako in the area.

  Something else was needed to fire such a long passion, and he found that too. He describes the terrain quite nonchalantly, but this is terribly difficult country, untracked except for the kokako hunters’ paths, inaccessible to all but the experienced, or rather, the truly inspired. Perfect kokako country. Even he was wary: ‘It was deceptive,’ he tells me, ‘easy to get lost in. I felt, if there is kokako, this has got to be the spot. But there was nothing at all, until I walked out. Then something amazing happened. I was a bit confused about the exact location of my base camp. I knew I was getting very close to it. I got out my compass and started working out how far it would be. I moved a few metres to a good spot to have a look, use my compass.

  ‘And suddenly behind me I heard this wonderful kokako call, the full organ song. It was exactly the same dialect I’d been using [for the playback call]. I thought for some reason my tape was playing. But it didn’t sound as if it was coming from my pack. It repeated. I checked. It seemed to be coming from a tree, very close. I turned off my recorder just in case. Oh, this amazing call. I never saw the bird.’

  And that set the pattern. Heard, felt (the whap of its wings), even seen, never filmed.

  Rhys was confused. Why the same call as his recording? As his search progressed, he realised the answer: kokako are good mimics, like tui, kaka or bellbirds. They can even imitate the alarm bark of a deer, he tells me. ‘You cannot be 100 per cent certain that what you hear isn’t a clever tui, or a clever kaka. This could not have been a tui because of its clarity, its nuance of call. A kaka, perhaps. I’ve experienced a kaka call so close to a kokako’s that if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes on a log with its gob open making that call I would not have believed it.’

  This is the escape clause in the searchers’ unwritten contract: they discount any report that is based on call alone.

  The Wildlife Service, as it was then, did not accept his evidence. As far as they were concerned, the bird’s existence remained unconfirmed.

  Uncluttered by bureaucracy, Rhys’s mind was clear. He hadn’t seen the bird, but he had heard it, and he left the island believing that, probably, kokako still lived there.

  He saw the bird for the first time at Fraser Creek near the Caples Valley with a small team of ornithologists. First he saw that moss-grubbing sign. Then he heard organ calls from the forest edge. One of his companions heard them too, so close they seemed to be coming from the tree above his head. He saw a large, long-legged bird, running up a sloping tree trunk, almost certainly a kokako.

  The Forest Service took this report seriously. They gave Rhys three months to search for it.

  Already the quest was changing him. He spent those three months alone, sometimes passing the night with trampers in their huts. He became a creature of the forest: ‘I became so acute. I could hear the faintest things. I could see tiny movements. I became so tuned-in I could follow kaka and kaka almost accepted me. I became almost one of them.’

  He seemed to be a good deal closer to kaka than he was to the Wildlife Service, in fact. They didn’t accept his report, even when the Forest Service backed it. Rhys might have been working for the Forest Service, but Wildlife considered him an amateur.

  Then he went up the Glenroy River in the mountains south of Murchison, where he was doing some work for Timberlands, the forestry company. First he found that moss-grubbing. He played his recording of a North Island kokako juvenile. To his glee, a kokako responded with a short but beautiful song. He stalked it. An hour passed. Then he saw it!

  It was gleaning insects, or perhaps honeydew, from the bough of a big beech tree. It flipped upside down and continued feeding. Then righted itself.

  Oh, the moment of clarity! He could see its sturdy, unmistakeable bill. A wattle on the left side of its face, pale-straw coloured, neither orange nor red. It was the only time he would ever see the bird’s trademark at such close range.

  On 19 November 1984 Rhys was back in the Mount Anglem area on Stewart Island and this time he saw his bird, again. He’d been tramping for three hours in pouring rain through truly difficult country even by Stewart Island standards. He crossed a saddle, pitched his tent. He was soaking wet. A tramper would have changed his clothes, dried out, cooked a meal, sat in his tent wondering whether he was having fun yet. Rhys went for a nostalgic walk in the rain.

  That’s the thing about a quest. This was terraced country, gouged by ravines, lonely, easy to get lost in. He’d had no luck here earlier, but if there really were kokako — so cautious, so cryptic, so furtive — this was where they’d be.

  He circled, got back to a stream which he knew would lead to his tent site, heard what he thought was a tui. Funny, he thought, tui don’t call in the rain.

  He reached the base of a rimu where the call seemed to come from, looked up.

  A bird took off. A grey bird, silvery-grey, shining white on its underparts. A slow take-off. He’s a good ornithologist: even if he hadn’t seen its colours, that take-off ruled out tui or kaka. He can see that bird today just as clearly.

  He heard it again, singing from the next rimu along, perhaps sixty metres away. He went to the base of that tree. It was singing its head off, switching between notes, tui-like then bellbird-like, and Rhys wondered if he was mistaken.

  Then it flew. Right above his head, a grey bird with a long tail and an even, determined flight. It landed on another tree. Charlie Douglas described its flight as both short and awkward: ‘They prefer to run about the limbs and trunks of the low scrub, they never actually walk but run with a strolling sort of gait that is very funny.’

  Oh god, Rhys thought, why did I leave my camera behind? He had his binoculars but the rain was blurring their lenses. The bird sat in the tree, its head up, distinctively kokako.

  Oh, it was a kokako all right. Rhys knew it. But he had no standing then, and not all that much experience either. He was a volunteer. His sighting was not officially accepted.

  All told, he counts seven sightings, four of them either certain or close to it. No
t many for four decades’ work, perhaps, but definitive.

  At the turn of the new millennium Rhys and the loose consortium of kokako-watchers decided on a massive search, financed mainly by the then-ascendant Maruia Nature Catalogue and Ecologic Foundation. The search immediately threw up two leads.

  A Westport bushman called Dan McKinnon reported hearing, and seeing, kokako in the Charleston area in 2000. No kaka, no tui could have imitated it. The call was more than twenty seconds long — full organ song, clear, perfect — and Dan’s descriptions were foolproof enough to be unofficially accepted by experts. He recorded the call. The recording was lost in a house fire.

  The search was running true to form.

  I first met Rhys in those Charleston forests in 2004. He was working deep in craggy territory with two fellow kokako-hunters. They had heard the calls of three birds. No question, Rhys said.

  We had breakfast at the Charleston pub, eventually, for the only other diner that morning proved to be the owner, who was also cook, waiter and sole occupant, and he wanted to read his newspaper and finish his coffee first.

  I had visited this place as a child with my father, when the pub was the ancient European. He knew the publican, who showed me artefacts including a jar of gold nuggets and a beetle trapped in ‘local’ kauri gum. Much later I realised the gum could not have been local and I wondered about the gold too. Even the town’s history seemed negotiable, a goldmining place once fabulously rich and said to have had ninety-nine hotels. The European was the sole survivor, and it didn’t last much longer.

  Tourism is the new gold. Visitors climb through limestone caves, through pits and tunnels. So did we. We drove into the Paparoa mountains to where Rhys’s two companions, Peter Rudolf and his wife, Mon, hunched on a track eating their breakfast (nowhere near as a good as ours, but much healthier). Then off up the side of a valley we went. It was tricky going, and our silence was broken by yelps of anguish as we tried unsuccessfully to negotiate fallen trees and avoid the deep fissures and pits in this limestone country, all the while scanning the treetops in case the kokako, Madonna like, should decide to reveal itself to its most recent converts.