How to Watch a Bird

by Steve Braunias

  how to watch a bird

  steve braunias

  AWA PRESS

  To Emily and Minka

  Summer

  IT WAS OUR first summer together. We had gone on a road trip up north over Christmas – five motels in seven nights, wet towels drying on the back seat. It was barbecue weather, New Zealand with sand in its hair, barefoot on hot pavements, undressed and dazed and unshaved, on vacation, gone fishing, fed and watered, half asleep, on good terms with itself, happy, setting off fireworks to see in the New Year.

  There was an afternoon watching something spectacular – on the beach at Ruakaka, where a flock of gannets smashed into the water and came back up with fish. That was such a dazzling sight, but every day was dazzling. When I think about that week, I remember the sun high in the sky, the car strolling along on dusty roads between quiet fields of yellow short-haired grass. In the towns, fat kids stuffed themselves with ice-blocks and fizz outside dairies, and light breezes whisked dust down the middle of the street. The towns gave way to lines of gum trees peeling in the sun. You could go hours without hearing a sound in our lazy sensual isles at the end of the world.

  I was in love with New Zealand and in love with Emily. Summer with Emily – that’s mainly what I remember. Emily swimming, Emily sleeping, Emily driving her passenger.

  We went back to work. I don’t remember much about that. Life was with Emily at my rented apartment near a bay, with Emily at her rented apartment in the city. Late one night, I stepped out on to her balcony for a cigarette. It was towards the end of January. A summer’s evening, long past dark, the air finally cooling and only as warm as toast after the fructifying heat of daylight hours. I stood and smoked, and then a bird flew past right in front of my snoot. You could say it was any old bird – it was that common, unloved scavenger, a black-backed gull, a big quiet thing, in no apparent hurry, slowly flying past, then slowly circling back again, and its silent, sudden appearance in darkness was stranger than anything happening down below among the traffic and the street lights.

  It felt like a jolt. The gull had come by so close; in the darkness its white body had glowed like a lamp swinging on a porch. No doubt it had good reason to be going about its business on an obscure hour in the middle of downtown Auckland. What business? Back then, I would have thought that God only knew, and it turned out that I was right – God had known, in an earlier summer, 1968–69 to be precise, when the roof-nesting habits of black-backed gulls in downtown Auckland were studied by Graham Turbott, a lovely man who at 92 is the godfather of New Zealand ornithology.

  Turbott’s report on the gulls, published in a 1969 issue of Notornis, referred to the observation of four pairs of birds at breeding sites around the city. Two chicks were hatched from a bulky nest of grass and paper on the roof of the Old Oxford Theatre on Queen Street; one chick hatched but died on the roof of a hot-water tank on top of the Chief Post Office. Chicks were seen to depart the nest in mid January from the roof of the Magistrate’s Court in Kitchener Street. At 24 Cook Street, according to a Miss J. Walker who ‘kept a constant watch’ on the gulls’ nest in the gutter at the edge of the roof, a young bird, fully fledged at six weeks, left with both its parents on February 7; it had hatched from its manger in the gutter on Christmas Day.

  The bird I saw was an adult, and probably still feeding its chick. Black-backed gulls – Larus dominicianus – nest in large colonies of up to several thousand pairs in the greater outdoors of the coast, but form solitary two-parent families in the city. They can swallow a cutlet of mutton whole. Offal is also acceptable.

  The oldest recorded New Zealand black-back was a been-there, ate-that 28 years old. In its adult prime, the bird isn’t a bad looker; it has yellow eyes and a bright red smear on its bill. But it takes two moults and nearly three years before juveniles assume the smooth whiteness that glows like a lamp. Young black-backs are among the most unpleasant things on wings. A lot of people mistake these large mottled brutes for some other kind of bird, and refuse to throw them scraps, out of distaste for their appearance. No one should be in the least surprised that these plug-ugly thugs don’t get any sex until they are at least four years old.

  I didn’t know any of these things when I saw the black-back brush past my nose that summer’s evening. I didn’t know nothing about any birds. But when I caught sight of that one bird, felt the jolt it gave, that white flash in the black night, I was bowled over with happiness, and I thought: birds, everywhere. Summer in New Zealand fills with so much light that we become the land of the long white page. Every corner, every margin is filled with birds.

  As a weekly magazine columnist since 1999, a lot of my writing has imagined different kinds of maps of New Zealand – of the things and pleasures that are right in front of us, that tell almost a secret history of the place, that maybe even reveal an emotional truth about the place. And so I’ve written a series of columns about hot springs. About steak. About mangroves. About tearooms. About things and pleasures you can find all across the country, from one town or shore to the next, forming a grid. I now wanted very much to write about birds.

  Birds of the city and town, on lawn and roof. Birds of the bush and the shore and the wide open sea. Paddock, lakeside, riverbank, wharf, telephone wire, bridge, swamp, alp: everywhere, birds. Migrants, most dramatically the bar-tailed godwit, flying for seven, eight days from Alaska without rest, until landfall in New Zealand. Common or garden varieties, like the blackbird and the house sparrow, brought to New Zealand by England’s homesick colonists. Native endemics, some still around – the tui, the takahe – and some wiped out, extinct, ghosts of another time – the huia, the moa. Birds that have come and gone and may come again, such as the rednecked avocet, quite possibly the most amazing bird to ever grace these shores, but seldom straying here from its breeding grounds across the ditch in Brisbane. Birds nesting under bridges; birds nesting in sand. Big fat birds, birds as small as full stops, as a row of dots …

  Could you be a bit more specific? Yes, in time. 2006 became my year of birds. I took down names. I saw birds I never knew existed. I became fascinated with birds that no longer existed, and with the literature of birds, with the social history of watching birds in New Zealand. I learned things. I shared pleasures. I saw another New Zealand, a particular geography where its borders and centres were defined by birds – a feathered New Zealand. And I saw another kind of New Zealander, their lives transformed, consumed, by birds.

  I loved seeing what they had seen, that year, and years before. I loved discovering a simple truth: to watch a bird is to see the world in a completely different way.

  I watched the birds – ‘Beside us,’ as poet Matthew Arnold wrote, ‘but alone’ – and I watched the watchers. I watched the world of New Zealand with refreshed eyes. It was a great privilege. I felt alert, awed, alive. And it was strange timing the way that marvellous year coincided with something else in my life, something amazing, that happened along the way.

  Gannet on the nest, Waiheke, 2.10.46

  An early bird

  BIRDS ARE SO obvious, and so apart. They have their own New Zealand. We all know about the famous roosts – the gannet colonies at Muriwai and Cape Kidnappers, the albatrosses and penguins in Dunedin, the muttonbirds in Foveaux Strait. We care about the continued presence of our emblematic birds such as the kiwi and the kakapo lurking in the bush. It’s a very good thing to go to sleep in our houses with the familiar sound of the morepork hooting through the night. For years, my favourite bird-watching spot in the whole country was where I could see the 40 or so pairs of little shags that nested in a stand of trees above a pond by the kiosk in Christchurch’s Hagley Park from June through to January.

  Lovely. But this is the notion of birds
fitting in with the rest of us – birds lucky enough to be left to their own devices, survivors of modern, peopled life. Most of us think of birds as something in the background. They flit and they pace, they nest and they sing, bystanders of the air, second-class citizens, largely unnoticed. They may as well be grass.

  One afternoon in February, I bowled along to the hall of birds at the Auckland Museum. Replica of a moa here, replica of a likewise extinct and distinctly ponderous New Zealand giant penguin there. All well and good, most interesting, but what made it shattering was that my visit to the museum was the first time I learned a simple fact which I assume so many schoolchildren have learned: that New Zealand, uniquely, spectacularly, was birdland. Until the arrival of humans, birds had the run of the place. They were here when the New Zealand archipelago set itself loose from Gondwanaland about 80 million years ago. The theory is that the moa and the kiwi, our famous ratites, flightless birds, just stood there as the land separated. Cutely, the theory’s known as Moa’s Ark – New Zealand was a cargo ship, and the ratites went along for the ride.

  More birds arrived, by wing and wind, and it appears likely that most of our native species, such as the tui, are actually ancient Australians. Since when – 40 million years ago? Twenty million? Is it possible the kiwi also flew from Australia, and then adapted to life in New Zealand as a flightless ground predator?

  Birds are small-boned; the fossil record is lousy. I suspect the lack of evidence acts as a balm to Don Hadden, a former teacher at the Christian school Middleton Grange in Christchurch, and one of our most knowledgeable bird photographers. His book 99 New Zealand Birds quotes Genesis: ‘God created … every winged bird according to its kind.’

  Middleton Grange goes in for the nonsense of a young Earth created by God only 8000 years ago. The rest of us can thank birds for explaining the way the world really works: the light bulb of the theory of evolution that first flashed over Darwin’s head was courtesy of his study of Galapagos Island finches. There is an exhilarating passage in his book Journal of the Beagle, written long before he came up with the single greatest idea ever to occur to the human mind, where he muses on the different beak structure of 13 finches: ‘Seeing this … diversity in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.’

  The glint of that light bulb over his head came as Darwin sailed on the Beagle towards New Zealand. He spent the Christmas of 1835 here. He hated it, couldn’t wait to leave. Q: What do you think of New Zealand, Mr Darwin? A: Rubbish. But he had unknowingly set foot on one of the world’s great natural laboratories. In 1839, Richard Owen, an English biologist and one of the few men the kindly Darwin detested, identified the fossil remains of a giant bird as the moa. Talk about your ‘modified for different ends’: the moa and other flightless birds evolved to take the place of land mammals, and found their food on the forest floor.

  ‘As time passed,’ wrote that emotional Victorian ornithologist James Drummond, ‘the birds that had come down to these parts found they possessed a land of surpassing goodness.’ It’s long been supposed that mammals were absent in New Zealand, although the discovery in late 2006 of three small bones in Central Otago proved that a mammal species had existed here, about 16 million years ago. ‘This ranks up there with the discovery of the first moa bones, and the first dinosaur bones in New Zealand,’ Te Papa’s fossil curator, Alan Tennyson, told The New Zealand Herald. Really? It’s true that the find exploded a myth. But steady on. The mammal was about the size of a mouse. Tennyson: ‘This shows the land of birds is not true. However, if land mammals were this size, the story may not have changed much…’

  In a land without predators, birds never had it so good. Strangely, no photos exist from that period, but you can see it imagined in those fantastic paintings, dripping with ancient ooze and populated with outrageous bird-people, by Bill Hammond. The Christchurch painter has said the inspiration for his famous series came from a visit to the subantarctic Auckland Islands in 1991. ‘I saw a New Zealand before there were men, women, dogs and possums.’

  He saw a New Zealand where birds were right out in front. That stern Victorian ornithologist James Drummond seemed to find this a deplorable state of affairs. ‘Life was too easy for them; so many first neglected, and then lost, the power of flight, and dropped into an indolent way of doing things, which became their undoing.’

  Actually, mankind became their undoing. We are often fed the line that early Maori formed a deep spiritual bond with the natural world, treated it with awe and respect. That line has quite a lot going for it. Probably the best instance is Margaret Orbell’s book Birds of Aotearoa: A Natural and Cultural History, which reads like an ode to the assorted glorious harmonies between Maori and New Zealand’s birds.

  You won’t read anything like that about the first European settlers. Ornithological literature tends to cast white colonists as a barbarian horde who sacked the land. They felled bush and drained swamps. They introduced predators. They shot birds for sport, or to collect the skins.

  Shocking, disgraceful. But Maori hunting and Maori-introduced predators, including the rat and the dog, led to the extinction of all nine species of ‘indolent’ moa, various species of goose, duck, adzebill, rail, coot, the magnificent Haast’s eagle, and other birds – in fact, the number far outweighs the avian species made extinct since the arrival of the first Europeans.

  Point-scoring of this nature only conforms to the national pastime of separating every issue in New Zealand society to either side of a racial divide. Yes, the moa – with its estimated population of 187,590 reduced to precisely zero – fell victim to what Tim Flannery, author of The Future Eaters, calls ‘the black hole’ theory of extinction, meaning that they fell into that dark, bottomless pit known as the human gob. But much of New Zealand was still birdland when James Cook sailed into view. When the Endeavour entered Queen Charlotte Sound on 17 January 1770, the dawn chorus sang its head off – ‘a melodious wild musick’, as heard by the ship’s naturalist, Joseph Banks.

  The sound we hear now is an unplugged version. The catastrophe of two waves of human settlement has diminished bird populations, and forced many on to offshore islands. Over the past 50 years, efforts by conservationists have attempted, and sometimes succeeded, in bringing endangered birds back to the mainland, and in extreme cases back from the brink. Fantastic. We want them around. All birds make us feel happy, feel better about where we live, but the point is that it’s not about our feelings – it’s actually about the birds.

  I learned something the night I brought along an advance proof copy of Extinct Birds of New Zealand, a handsome new illustrated book published by Te Papa, to an Ornithological Society meeting in Auckland. If anyone wanted to have a look at it, I said, they were welcome. It proved attractive bait. Really, it was like bringing a crate of booze to AA. They flocked around it, they pawed at it, inspecting the pictures, reading out bits of text, cooing and cawing and sounding expert opinions. In short, they loved it. But as well as the noises of admiration for author Alan Tennyson and artist Paul Martinson, there were constant sighings. It was actually a sad gathering. They felt cheated. A stillness had entered the room: I was a messenger of death. These birdwatchers were looking at birds they would never see.

  They had seen so many birds, handled their soft warm bodies, studied them in depth – they were fans of birds, they followed their careers, but it was an awful lot deeper than that. They craved life. A valuable lesson, and a good place for me to start learning how to watch a bird.

  Little Pied Shag on her nest calls to her mate, while a pair of Big Black Shags rest after feeding young, Foxton, 27.11.42

  A good shag

  IF YOU WANT to know how to watch a bird, what you do is borrow someone else’s eyes. There are a few ways of going about this. The first and best way is to get a pair of binoculars. They really do feel like another person has moved
in. Actually, they are another person, a bird-watcher’s best friend. They do what you most want: they bring you closer to the bird.

  The effect is quite staggering at first; after continued use, it’s still quite staggering. I never get over it, always feel happily dazzled by that simple magic trick. As a form of media, binoculars even beat television.

  Binoculars is a long, ungainly word, and no one who goes bird-watching wastes time with all those syllables. The proper term is bins, just as the proper term for the next big step, a telescope, is scope. Scopes are widescreen. They cost serious money. You have to cart them around. I travel light. Also, I’m cheap.

  Bins are like a portable TV. As such, my favourite programme in the autumn and winter of 2006 took place at the bay around the corner from my apartment. I trotted down there four or five days a week, at low tide and high tide, the tide shuffling in and the tide shuffling out on a mud-flat next to the Auckland harbour bridge. There were South Island pied oystercatcher – SIPO they’re called – and kingfisher, and three species of shag, and a pair of white-faced heron. There was also a homeless guy who possibly slept under an overturned dinghy on the beach. He owned a sack and a transistor. He drank Jim Beam mixed with Sprite lemonade. He held long conversations with himself, attempting to provide answers to a series of indignant questions. I would be creeping towards the SIPOs at the water’s edge on a low tide, and hear him ask himself in a strangled voice: ‘But you never went to her funeral, did you, so what are you talking about?’ Poor devil.

  The bins made the birds look immense. It’s often thought that New Zealand birds are dowdy and downright boring in appearance, but this is a foolish, mistaken notion. Take the SIPOs. They are common enough: the population is estimated at about 85,000, along almost the entire coastal stretch of New Zealand. They breed inland, vast numbers nesting on South Island river beds, and many choose to winter in the warmer northern climates. They are a striking bird, clearly identified by the clean, sharp lines of their black and white plumage, and their vivid red bill. In bright sunlight, the bill – ‘remarkably long and remarkably red,’ wrote a hero of this book, bird photographer Major Geoffrey Buddle – flames up into a juicy, translucent orange, and so do their eyes.