How to Watch a Bird

by Steve Braunias

  I kept my distance – it would be despicable to interrupt the vital time wading birds have to feed – when they arrived on the tide shuffling out. The SIPOs inched the shoreline from east to west. They stabbed at bivalves, turning their heads sideways and often under the shallow water as their bill prised open the shells. Not, by the way, of oysters. Buddle: ‘If you ask me why “oystercatcher”, I must confess that I do not know. I have never seen one catch an oyster nor attempt to; anyway, I doubt very much if it could it would, or for that matter would if it could, for the simple reason that crabs, shrimps, sand hoppers, and so on are available in plenty just for the taking. However, oyster-catcher it is and has long been all the world over, and there is nothing we can do about it.’

  It may or may not be a shame that Buddle fails to provide salacious ruminations on why a shag is called a shag. Officially, they are called cormorants, and I have talked to New Zealand ornithologists who are strict about only ever using that term. Perhaps they dislike the fact its popular name shares the word we use for one of our most popular activities. However, shag it is, and there is nothing we ought to do about it. Like the oystercatcher, the shag is a common sight around New Zealand shores: everyone is familiar with its dramatic pose, that gesture of mercy, when it spreads its wings wide apart to dry after underwater fishing.

  Down at my local bay, the SIPOs and the shags filled my bins for many happy hours. So did the New Zealand kingfishers, when they sat immobile on exposed rocks on the shore, and in the overhanging branches of pohutakawa. They waited like that to fly off at incredible speeds in a direct line at their prey, which they caught and then smashed to appalling bloody pieces against a branch. I watched one do this for many happy minutes to a mouse. It stoved its head in. Such violence, and yet the kingfisher has the most peaceful and musical of Latin classifications, Halcyon sancta.

  Then there were the pair of white-faced heron. In the years I lived beside a mangrove creek I had adored their yellow-toed stealth and graceful flight. Now, at the bay, I spied on their feeding at the water’s edge, and in rock pools. Craftily, they rake up the mud floor with one foot, and then pounce on anything desirable that moves. At high tide, I followed the herons as they flew over the bay, across the road, and into a stand of pine trees. They had built a shaggy nest in the crook of high branches. I liked to watch them there towards dusk. As the light dimmed, the trees and the herons lost their texture and became black shapes, a silhouette, an outline. The birds became creatures made of wood. Wood that made a noise: as one bird settled into the nest, the other would pace along nearby branches, and both would set up a long bout of possibly affectionate croaking.

  The herons, kingfishers, oystercatchers and good shags were just in the one bay. There are over 200 regular species of bird in New Zealand, urban and rural, at sea and on shore, a swirling presence, yours for the viewing.

  Grey Noddy, Curtis Island, 7.12.06

  The trouble with Walter

  WHERE SHOULD YOU be looking, and when? And what are you actually looking for, and looking at? Once again, you need to borrow someone else’s eyes. Beginners and experts alike need a field guide. A guide is a birdwatcher’s second best friend. There are a few titles available, but you want the best, and the best is The Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand by authors Barrie Heather and Hugh Robertson, and illustrator Derek Onley. You should buy it at once. It’s the bible, the greatest book of all time at this precise bird-watching moment in New Zealand.

  Even so, I freely admit a great liking for its predecessor, the 1966 guide by Bob Falla, Dick Sibson and Graham Turbott. It contains what is almost certainly the most gothic sentence in New Zealand ornithological literature: ‘In 1874 the skin of a freshly dead Australian Darter was found nailed up inside an old shed in Hokitika.’

  Before the 1966 guide there was W. R. B. Oliver’s landmark 1930 reference volume New Zealand Birds, revised in 1955. And before that there was Pérrine Moncrieff’s somewhat eccentric but vastly popular New Zealand Birds and How to Identify Them, published in 1925. And before that there was the 1904 guide, The Animals of New Zealand, which is actually almost entirely about birds, co-authored by Captain Frederick Hutton and that stern, emotional Victorian ornithologist James Drummond.

  I couldn’t resist. I got the lot, scored in second-hand bookstores, and kept adding. My current bird bibliography weighs in at 37 titles. In part, it was a pursuit of knowledge. Really, though, it was the excitement and greed of discovering a genre of New Zealand writing, a whole new sort of author, a new literature. Inevitably, this led to the one author with whom all New Zealand ornithologists have to deal, have to come to some kind of arrangement. His book is the only real international classic in New Zealand ornithology; his name is like a haunting, the way it bangs and crashes through the ages – that vilified collector of bird skins, Sir Walter Buller.

  There is no way you can sidestep Buller’s dark shadow. He was born in the Hokianga in 1838, the son of a Wesleyan missionary. His great published work was A History of the Birds of New Zealand. There were two editions, published in 1873 and 1888. Graham Turbott edited a very handsome edition in 1967; I found a second-hand copy for $150. The original editions cost $7000. In US currency.

  In late 2006, I got my hands on the 1888 edition, fetched up from the storeroom of one of the world’s great libraries. It’s quite something. The artwork, by Johann Keulmans, is luscious, and usually accurate; Buller’s field notes on the birds are evidence of close and passionate observation. Or, as Turbott says in the introduction to his 1967 edition, ‘He writes as a naturalist, with keen enjoyment of wild nature and with the naturalist’s sure vision.’ It’s a detailed record of a time and a place, the building of Britain’s far-flung colony, set at a crucial point for native birds as they coped – or didn’t cope – with a reshaped land suddenly crawling with predators such as rats, stoats and pigs, and drastically altered by farms and towns. In short, it’s a priceless historical document – well, yours for only US$7000.

  It’s also the most violent book about New Zealand birds ever written. Its pages shake with gunshot. Someone has probably compiled a count of how many birds Buller freely admits to killing. There was the white heron: ‘In the summer of 1859 (after stalking him for two hours) I shot a beautiful adult male.’ Most notoriously, there were his blithely told encounters with huia: ‘He came bounding along, and presented himself at close range. This gave me an opportunity of watching this beautiful bird and marking his noble expression, if I may so express it, before I shot him.’ And, describing an 1883 trip: ‘A pair of Huias, without uttering a sound, appeared in a tree overhead, and as they were caressing each other with their beautiful bills, a charge of No 6 brought both to the ground together.’

  The prosecution rests. The huia is now extinct, and Buller is popularly regarded as the bastard who blasted that remarkable forest bird to an early grave. Naturally, he was cast as a whiskered Victorian villain in Nick Blake’s biographical play Dr Buller’s Birds, performed at Circa Theatre, Wellington in 2006. Buller has ‘the blood of the last huia on his hands’. He is facing ‘the dark night of the soul’. He contemplates his sins, his wrongful intervention in the sacred ‘Maori ecology of the land’. What pantomime. What dreary, simple-minded nonsense.

  In reality Buller was a complex case. God knows how many huia he took down, but the bird’s fate was decided more by the introduction of predators and the felling of native forest. Buller actually urged the government to establish island sanctuaries for the bird. In 1892 he successfully lobbied for it to be given protected status. And yet the next year he went into the bush and grabbed more specimens for his clients. ‘I was appalled to discover what Buller had done,’ his biographer Ross Galbreath told science writer Rebecca Priestley. ‘He was a real rascal in some ways.’

  In some ways… Bird collecting was an established practice in Buller’s era; the question is how far he took it. The cantankerous, gifted naturalist Brian Parkinson has argued that other collectors of the
time were more responsible than Buller, although Buller tuts about the ‘zeal’ of his contemporaries, and also dobs in Maori, referring to a party of eleven who hunted huia for a month in the Manawatu Gorge and came back with 646 skins.

  In the preface to his 1888 edition, he writes, ‘It has been the author’s desire to collect and place on record a complete life history of these birds before their extirpation should have rendered such a task impossible.’ The previous year, the British naturalist Professor Newton had given an address in Manchester, where he said, ‘I am told by Sir Walter Buller that in New Zealand one may now live for weeks and months without seeing a single example of its indigenous birds.’

  At worst, this reads like a kind of wishful thinking: Buller shared the risible nineteenth-century notion that Maori, too, were a dying race. In an 1885 speech he said that ‘in all probability, five and twenty years hence there will only be a remnant [of Maori] left.’ The task of civilised Europeans, Buller thought, was to preserve these last traces – ‘to smooth down their dying pillow’. What odious words.

  If he thought the same of our birds, you have to assume his idea of a nice pillow was the Zoological Society’s Gardens in Regents Park, London, to which he dispatched two huia. (It’s possible Keulemans visited here when he made his illustrative studies for Buller’s books.) Incredible to think of the female huia in the London parrot house, between a toucan and a hornbill, fed boiled eggs, fresh meat and worms. Its fate? Buller: ‘It died in a much emaciated condition.’

  Better to have shot it. Truly. Without Buller and his ilk, no physical record might exist of birds that were headed for a fall. I asked Brian Gill, the softly spoken and eminently sensible curator of birds at the Auckland Museum, whether we are in debt to the shotgun politics of collectors. He said, ‘That legacy in terms of reaching the public, inspiring by way of education – what a valuable thing it’s been.’

  The museum has 13,000 bird skins; Te Papa and the Canterbury Museum each have about 20,000. These days, the majority of fresh skins come from dead birds picked up on beach patrols. Would it be good to have more collecting of perfect specimens in the field? ‘In some cases it might be,’ Gill said. ‘A classic situation would be the rock wren. New Zealand wrens are incredibly important birds. The latest DNA work is showing that they are the sister group to all the other passerines, the perching birds, which are a huge group of birds, and the first branch of their evolutionary tree were the New Zealand wrens. They’re the most primitive survivors. They are incredibly important ornithologically; they’re like living fossils. The rock wren is very rare and probably declining. There are almost no specimens left in our collection. Museums asked for permission to collect them and were turned down. I think that’s short-sighted.’

  Hurry now while stocks last. With the huia, Buller charged in when he could – and even after he couldn’t – once bagging 16 in a single shooting spree. What an exquisite bird it was, about the size of a magpie, black with a shiny green gloss, its bill ivory white, a rich orange wattle adorning the female. It hopped, bounding along forest floors in the Ruahine, Tararua and Rimutaka ranges. Its astonishing feature was the weird and very rare nature of its sexual dimorphism; Sir Richard Owen, when he first studied the remains of a male and female huia, thought they were two completely different species. The sexes of most birds look exactly the same, but the huia went right out there, the male short-billed, the female with its bill curved in a long, elegant parabola. Exquisite, and dead and buried, the last definite report in 1907, although unconfirmed sightings have been as agonisingly recent as 1960.

  Buller thought that hunting had once caused a decline in population. He was right. In 1888, though, he claimed, ‘The bird is now far more plentiful.’ He remains the wrongest person in the history of New Zealand birds.

  Heron (blue, white-faced)

  A visitor from Australia

  THE PESTILENCE OF rat and possum, the years of slash and burn, and the Buller years of cultural imperialism gave the birdland of New Zealand a sound thrashing. Recovery has been slow. There are still far too many endangered species, and birdwatchers need to maintain an eternal vigilance against the threat of environmental damage. But the worst years of bust are over. New Zealand is now enjoying the boom years. It may not last – declining populations of some birds offer depressing truth about global warming – but New Zealanders are holding onto birds for dear life.

  Eradication programmes of predators such as the possum and the rat are proving effective. The regeneration of native bush is proving effective. And inland bird sanctuaries in Karori, Waitakere, Mount Bruce and most recently Maungatautari Mountain, as well as the island sanctuaries on Tiritiri Matangi, Kapiti and Motuara, are proving spectacularly effective. In 2006, a member of parliament, Marian Hobbs, threatened to quit the government when the Cabinet rejected an ambitious six-million-dollar bid by the Karori sanctuary to provide a visitors’ centre. Hobbs had lobbied hard for the cash: ‘You can’t imagine how hurt I feel having fought this through. It’s embarrassing. It’s bloody hurtful.’ If she had made good her threat, the possible loss of her Wellington electorate would have seriously damaged Labour’s fragile alliance. A government for a stitchbird.

  Offshore, a previously unknown population of snipe have appeared on Campbell Island in the subantarctic; in towns and cities, native birds such as the tui are more abundant. It’s led to a growing and overt love affair that New Zealanders are feeling towards their own birds.

  In 2005, the tui won a Royal Forest and Bird public poll as New Zealand’s favourite bird. The following year, the total number of votes tripled. This time the winner was the fantail. In both years, the top ten were a who’s who of native species – our emblematic birds, almost all birds of the bush, the exalted K club of kiwi, kakapo, kokako, kea, kereru (New Zealand pigeon) and korimako (bellbird). Expect the kaka to feature in next year’s list – urban sightings of that large antique parrot are becoming frequent.

  All well and good, except that it’s inspired that reflex kick that is always itching for release: nationalism. Native birds – the K club, and the tui, fantail and a few other obvious candidates – are seen as the only birds that truly count. Hence, almost the only time we hear about birds in New Zealand is when they’re under threat. While the conservation movement utters a long lament, how often do we hear about bird populations that are doing real well, thanks, and that it’s due to human populations?

  Take the kingfisher. It’s flourished in urban New Zealand: lots of introduced mice are just dying to have their heads stoved in, and power lines and posts provide excellent viewing platforms above the killing fields. Actually, the kingfisher was once thought to have adapted too well. Buller notes: ‘In Wanganui it provoked the hostility of the Acclimatisation Society by preying on the young of the House sparrow, which had been introduced at great expense; and the committee encouraged a crusade against the offendors by offering a premium on kingfishers’ heads.’

  That bizarre story also serves as a reminder of the role played by acclimatisation societies in the array of birds we now take for granted. Filled with longing, and probably wanting to smother New Zealand native birds with a pillow, nineteenth-century British settlers filled the skies with birds from ‘Home’. House sparrows were introduced in 1865 – by Buller: ‘I must plead guilty to having been accessory to their importation, having advertised in the London papers offering a reward of 100 pounds for 100 pairs delivered alive in the colony.’

  Starlings arrived in 1862–63, thrushes in 1862–78, blackbirds in 1862–75, mynas in 1870–77. There were also liberations of four kinds of finches (chaffinch, greenfinch, goldfinch, redpoll) and, from Australia, over 1000 magpies. A few species didn’t take; there were, for example, unsuccessful attempts to bring in the nightingale and English robin.

  It might be instructive if the grandly named Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society held a poll to determine the public’s least favourite birds. In the pecking order of New Zealand’s bird species, th
e English birds – common as muck, all over the shop – would rate scarcely above the bottom rung, down there with the rock pigeon, that cooing nincompoop of the city, and the unjustly despised gulls and Australian magpie. But the English birds deserve respect, and admiration. Study of their characteristics and behaviour are just as fulfilling as those of any other bird. Almost certainly the most violent paper ever published in Notornis, the Ornithological Society journal, is ‘Nature Red in Claw: How and Why Starlings Kill Each Other’, the result of a 20-year nest-box study, written by J. E. C. and M. M. Flux, in 1992, complete with graphic photographs of two birds with their claws dug deep into each other’s murdered head.

  Good luck to the native birds cowering in the bush. But most of us live at home. The birds around us are brilliant to watch, to observe, to get to know. That most definitely includes the introduced English birds. Example: every now and then during spring, blackbirds decide to attack car mirrors, because they regard their reflection as some new intruder. The show also includes birds that have arrived under their own steam, often from Australia. One of the great appeals of watching birds is the constant change. Birds exit, birds arrive. Birds don’t sit still; they migrate, they turn up in places no one ever anticipates. Places like New Zealand.