Wild Journeys

by Bruce Ansley

  We hadn’t gone very far before I was completely lost, unable even to say with any conviction which way was down. I realised what a fine bushman Rhys must be, for he was at home in far more remote and difficult country than this, often alone.

  Rhys played a flute-like, melancholy recording of a kokako as a contact call. We heard a riroriro, a tui, a bellbird. Otherwise the forest was quiet until Rhys and his companions froze like pointing dogs, their noses aimed at the canopy. ‘Hear that?’

  Perhaps it was, perhaps not. Fourteen years on, the memory has gelled into a call, the music lodged in my mind.

  I talked to Dan McKinnon then. The old bushman was absolutely clear. ‘I was walking through the bush in 1998 and I heard this call. In all my time in the bush I’d never heard anything like it. Next day I heard it again. So I recorded it. And I saw two of them on the same day, big birds, bigger than tui, very sneaky in the bush.’

  He was exact, and convincing. The wattles were a different colour on each bird. Their flights were short. They hopped. They could only have been kokako.

  I talked to the Department of Conservation, which was officially dismissive of Rhys’s work. The kokako-watchers had come up with nothing convincing, they said. It was unlikely that any of the sightings were real.

  Not long after that the DoC declared the South Island kokako extinct.

  Well, the hunt for the bird is littered with lost recordings, forgotten cameras, missed opportunities. Yet it has been going on for so long, the calls are so rare and sightings so fleeting, that in the end, you have to judge an observer’s worth, his or her experience and reliability and take their word for it.

  The second lead came from a pounamu carver in Greymouth, Mick Collins. He reported kokako in South Westland. He gave a very detailed account of finding seventeen kokako with two kaka in the Lake Moeraki area in the 1970s.

  Lake Moeraki lies near the coast, a little north of Haast. Rhys followed his track along a small creek, Venture Creek, to a ravine which usually had a dry creek bed. He bashed through thick wet undergrowth, played a recording, his kokako contact call. Got an instant response from perhaps 300 metres away.

  He headed for it, through the heavy understory, played his tape again when he reached a rise, a small spur. Boop boop boop came the answering call from right above his head, an unmistakable kokako call. ‘So here I am, dead still, binoculars, camera, everything focused. Nothing more. Silence. After a while I quietly move on. You never know. I move a few metres and suddenly here it is, exactly as Mick Collins had told me, this dry creekbed, steep ravine.’

  The kokako fell silent. But Rhys remained certain there was something in that forest.

  We arrange to meet there in November 2017. The trip falls through. I miss my shot for the first time, but not the last; and this would have been the most promising of meetings, for he had three brief glimpses of birds which looked exactly like kokako.

  Two months later he goes to the same spot. Nothing. He is despondent: ‘This is an area which was so exciting in November. I miss that slot and go in two months later. There’s absolutely nothing. How am I ever going to resolve this enigma? This is impossible. I’m giving up.’

  I cannot believe it. After a silence of perhaps two seconds, he adds, ‘Of course, I won’t give up, as you know.’

  Still, this is ominous. Few things can be more heart-breaking than declaring a lifetime’s work a failure.

  We make new arrangements. I’m to fly to Christchurch, drive to the West Coast, travel to the south of South Westland, leave my car at the Whakapohai River bridge, ignore a more recent track and take another one along the river to a small clearing in the forest where Rhys has set up a fly camp.

  The weather forecast goes from threatening to truly awful. We call it off.

  I have an argument with Air New Zealand over rebookings and flight insurance, which, to my great surprise, I win. Meanwhile the forecast storm simply doesn’t appear. The weather turns out to be quite good. Damn.

  I hear a defeated note in Rhys’s voice when I next talk to him. It’s so unusual that I cannot miss it. Usually he is cheerful. He has to be, to sustain hope and enthusiasm for so long.

  We set a new date and I make new bookings. The weather forecast goes from ominous to truly awful. Rhys calls. It’s a weather bomb, he says. It’s going to strike first exactly at the spot where we’re going into the bush to pitch our feeble tents. They’d be blown over the mountains all the way to Dunedin probably. Either that or they’d be flattened by falling trees, even if we got there, for he is certain that a bridge or two will be down and roads washed away or blocked by slips.

  The heck with it, I say, it all came to nothing last time, let’s take the chance.

  The lesson I should have learned, even if not from long experience of the Coast then from our experience a few weeks earlier was: never bet on West Coast weather.

  A fierce nor’-wester is blowing hard as a blacksmith’s bellows as I fly in. The Canterbury Plains have the bony look of a bare-knuckle fight.

  The day before, temperatures in Central Otago reached 37.6 degrees, the hottest January in fourteen years. Today severe gales and horrid rain are forecast for, well, right where I’m going. I’m starting to believe.

  Leaves, small branches fly onto the road and smack into the car windows like bullets. The air goes cloudy with a grey glaze like an old bathroom window. The mountains are black with menace.

  I pass through the Plains towns — Kirwee, Darfield, Springfield — and the tussocks lie down like whipped dogs. Shingle slides trickle down the mountainsides as if the iron clouds above are leaking metal. The first raindrops hit the windscreen like hailstones and suddenly I’m inside that Canterbury nor’-wester phenomenon, fiery hot to wild to storm in half an hour.

  Over Porters Pass where the wind turns gullies into blowpipes, whipping rocks off the cliff-sides, sniping at the car. Up the Waimakariri River, whose vast reaches seem to be on fire, clouds of spray whipped off the water and blown into the air like smoke.

  Into the dark, deep tunnel of Arthur’s Pass and over the Alps I go, the mountains spectres in the grey. The heat is just a memory. The rain is beating on the roof and I need a jacket.

  Hokitika seems quiet. It is quiet. People at the petrol station tell me power to the town has been cut off, right down the Coast too, and it is likely to stay that way for forty-eight hours.

  Things are getting worse. I head south, but only for a few kilometres. A friendly man stands at a roadblock. The road south has been blocked, he says. The good news is that it’s now open. The bad news is that it’s only open as far as Hari Hari.

  I go through anyway and it’s not long before I see why the road has been closed. Trees, some of them giants perhaps a century or two centuries old have been plucked at random and thrown across the road. Why would the cyclone pick that tree, and not its neighbour? Heaven knows what it’s like inside the forest. I think of the fly tents where we planned to spend the night and shudder. Rhys was right.

  Tree trunks have been chainsawed to allow the trickle of traffic through. A giant fully two storeys high almost blocks the road completely. It’s an upturned tree viewed from the bottom, its roots gesticulating in the air. I sneak around its edge, zig-zag along the highway, past, around, sometimes even over the debris and reach Hari Hari.

  It is growing dark, and it is clear that this is the biggest thing to happen to Hari Hari since Guy Menzies crash-landed his biplane in a nearby swamp and tried to convince disbelieving locals that he’d just made the first solo trans-Tasman flight.

  The hotel is full, of drivers and drinkers, many of them hoping to be guests. There’s no room at the inn. The owner tells me he could have filled his hotel twenty times over. It looks as if it has been filled twenty times over. People pack the the hallways, the reception office, the bars, the dining room. ‘Try down the road,’ he says wearily.

  A set of motels or cabins stands beside the road. The owner is talking to tourists and I can see his
body language from afar. He comes down the drive. ‘We’re full,’ he says, unnecessarily.

  ‘Oh well,’ I say, ‘it’s an ill wind . . .’

  He laughs. ‘Certainly is.’

  I drive back along the road, past the lovely Lake Ianthe and the roots and the wrecks, the rain spurting, until I reach the old bushman’s camp at Pukekura. It’s dark, of course. I have no cash, I say (stupid of me), and if they have no electricity, there’s no Eftpos . . .

  ‘Well,’ says the man, regarding me with bright blue eyes, ‘we can’t turn you away on a night like this. Where would you go? Do you have a sleeping bag?’

  I do. He unlocks the door of a small room in what seems to be an old accommodation lodge, a row of bedrooms each opening onto a veranda, a lavatory and cold shower at one end, kitchen at the other. Even without its glow of refuge, it’s a nice room, three walls pale yellow with cabbage trees painted on them, the fourth black like the ceiling, whose gold-painted stars sparkle in the dark.

  It has an old dresser with droopy plated brass handles and a mid-century Danish armchair which would fetch a fortune in Ponsonby, and a double bed, very soft. It is paradise in the storm and I stand on the grape-covered veranda and listen to happy voices from the kitchen and don’t think about Sky or spa baths.

  I leave a message for Rhys, who has taken refuge at Lake Paringa: ‘I’ll be there in the morning, don’t despair.’

  Next morning I drive back to Hari Hari, get some cash, return to Pukekura and pay for the room ($25, he says, but I force him up to $40) then drive back to Hari Hari.

  Everything is dripping. Beech trees lie everywhere. Huge pieces of earthmoving equipment pass on trucks. I follow them through Hari Hari and on to Whataroa.

  This road is supposed to be closed. It’s a wobbly course. But past the Mount Hercules bendy bit the road evens out. I reach Whataroa.

  Yes!

  I celebrate all the way through the little town until the road turns at its end and there’s a roadblock. A local has parked his car across the highway in case some dumb tourist or greenie doesn’t believe the story. Which is, that the road is blocked, that Franz Josef and Fox Glacier and points south are isolated, that 115 motorists, mainly tourists, have been stranded overnight in their cars and buses on the high road between the two tourist spots, that the road will be closed for at least two days.

  A crowd of tourists clusters around a man in a hi-viz jacket. He’s explaining to them why they can go no further: huge trees lie across the road, they’ve brought down power lines and they’re now tangled in the branches; one slip in particular is passable if drivers can cling to the wreckage of the road, but they’re much more likely to slip into the adjacent lake.

  A kind of groan, an amazed chorus, rustles through the crowd. Asian tourists look puzzled, Europeans indignant. ‘What do you expect us to do?’ one demands, in an English accent. The roadman looks as if he might make a suggestion, but desists, although he has the contented look of an official giving bad news. It might be two days, or two hours, but he might as well deliver the worst-case perspective: after all, if it’s wrong, who’s going to complain?

  A few locals hang around. For years tourists have been looking at them. Now they’re looking at tourists. They’re essential to the local economy but that doesn’t mean locals have to like them. For many Coasters, tourists are like the Greens, or ratatouille: they might be all right in their place, as long as their place is somewhere else.

  Greens? That brings me back. I’m chasing a man who’s chasing the South Island kokako, but must be getting very sick of me. I’ve pursued him around and around the most remote parts of the South Island.

  I leave him a message. The road is closed for days. He’ll have to go over the Haast Pass and through Wanaka to get to his home in Nelson. Why don’t we meet in Christchurch on his way back?

  I go back over the Alps to Christchurch. Next day I get a message from him. He’s in Hokitika. He got through the slips and the roadblocks no trouble. The road was only closed for a day. But where am I? Evidently our messages to each other have been marooned all over the hills, like tourists.

  We give up. He flies up to Auckland and we meet on Waiheke Island, where I guarantee no one has ever spotted a kokako, North Island or South.

  The North Island kokako has edged back from extinction, not without protest and a great deal of work.

  It seems unbelievable now, but government logging of native forest was still thriving in the 1970s. Official policy embraced clear-felling. Native forests, even kauri, were chopped to the ground.

  Kauri was saved first. Yet the Forest Service still insisted on ‘selective’ logging, taking some of the trees but often ruining the forest ecosystem. It took a massive public protest and the Maruia Declaration in 1977 to slow then stop the carnage.

  The North Island kokako became a symbol of that movement. Protesters took to the treetops to stop logging in one of its last strongholds, the Pureora State Forest. Now what’s left of that forest is the Pureora Forest Park, and the North Island kokako’s haunting song can be heard in several carefully managed habitats in the Waikato, Bay of Plenty, the Ureweras, Northland, even South Auckland. They’ve been fostered in various arks — Little Barrier Island, Tiritiri Matangi, Kapiti, Mount Bruce and other reserves in the northern half of the North Island — so successfully that the breeding population has increased five-fold since 1999.

  Can the South Island kokako be saved in the same way? Possibly. But someone has to find these ghost-like animals first.

  The bird’s standing improved a notch — more a mark on a bureaucrat’s pad — in 2013. Before that, its last officially accepted sighting was at Mount Aspiring in 1967, and in the void since it had been declared extinct.

  But it was seen again in 2007 in the Rainy Creek area south of Reefton and, six years later, the powers-that-be decided that reports of its death might have been exaggerated.

  Rainy Creek was one of the places where Rhys heard a kokako, in 2004, when he was working on bird surveys for Oceana Gold. The company later mined for gold near Reefton, closing the mine in 2016. He was walking up a ridge when the kokako called. ‘It was a beautiful organ note, but [the bird] had the same characteristics of invisibility. It was right beside me, but I couldn’t see it. I was busy trying to get the work done so I didn’t spend much time there but I thought, What a good site for kokako. In time one of the people doing predator control work is going to encounter this bird.’

  That is exactly what happened. On 21 March 2007 a man employed by the predator-control people saw a kokako.

  Len Turner was, in fact, engaged in relieving his bowels at the time, an unusual position from which to make history. He told Rhys he knew no one would believe him, but he also knew what he saw: a big steely-grey bird with a bluish tinge. It looked at him curiously, as well it might, turning its head from side to side and revealing amazing wattles, fleshy orange with a deep matt blue base. That was the clincher, really. The North Island kokako has blue wattles, the South Island a rich orange. But you had to have seen the bird to know the nuances of its wattles, the orange turning blue at their base.

  The sighting was confirmed by a second person, Peter Rudolf, who had experience with North Island kokako. He accompanied Len to the spot the next day. Peter was startled first to hear the distinctive deep thudding of the kokako’s wings then to see the allegedly extinct bird flying away from him in its typical shallow glide. Their report lifted the bird a notch above oblivion. It was only slowly elevated, however. The authority here is the Records Appraisal Committee of Birds New Zealand. The committee was cautious, understandably. The Department of Conservation had declared the bird extinct. The last accepted sighting of the bird had been in 1967, forty years before. That was a big gap, and the wheels ground slowly. Eventually a result emerged, reported to have been a majority call: now the bird was no longer extinct but in a hinterland called ‘data-deficient’.

  Still, Rhys, the most enduring South Island kokako-hunte
r in the land, was delighted. Even now, his voice rises in excitement as he talks about it.

  But the South Island kokako is still not ready to fly. ‘Data-deficient’ means too little is known about the bird to be certain one way or the other.

  Alec Milne, a long-time kokako-hunter, and a fellow-ornithologist, Richard Stocker, both of them from Golden Bay, compiled and published a list of 241 reports of the bird, both sightings and song, running from January 1990 to June 2012. The most certain of the reports were sightings from within ten metres with the naked eye or fifty metres with binoculars, and especially, those that described the complexities of the bird’s wattles, their ultimate identifying mark. That analysis reduced the numbers to thirteen compelling reports of the South Island kokako and and twenty-three likely ones. The eleven most authoritative went to the NZ Birds committee; the one in Reefton was accepted, while two others were attributed to the North Island kokako. In the bird world, becoming non-extinct is evidently as painful as extinction.

  To a layperson, 241 reports of a bird, from many different parts of the South Island, would be compelling evidence on its own. Even the cautious analysis of Messrs Milne and Stocker concludes that ‘the South Island kokako is extant’; that is, it survives.

  And why not? The New Zealand storm petrel was thought to have been extinct since 1850 when one was sighted (and photographed) off Whitianga in 2003, then more on Hauturu, Little Barrier Island.

  The takahe was declared long dead, vanished since 1898, gone without trace, before Geoffrey Orbell found a few huddling deep in the Murchison Mountains near Lake Te Anau on 20 November 1948. Careful conservation has increased their numbers to more than 300. Despite their record, New Zealanders do care about extinct birds and this Lazarus performance excited them considerably.