How to Watch a Bird

by Steve Braunias

  After we had chatted that July night over the tea and the malt biscuits, she picked me up outside my flat three days later, and I spent an exhilarating afternoon with her among the wading birds on Omaha Spit. Her first words were: ‘Aha. Got your bins. Good.’ I learned quickly that birders were tremendously single-minded. They didn’t waste time with talk of other things; life was something that flitted in the background: they had eyes only for birds. Phil Hammond, one of New Zealand’s few bona fide twitchers – birders actively and passionately engaged in sighting rare birds – told me once about tromping across Waikato farmland with two other twitchers in pursuit of the rare dunlin. One of the men had just had a successful triple bypass. ‘Funny thing was,’ Phil said, ‘no one even mentioned it…’

  Which is not to say that getting Gwen to talk about things other than birds was as hard as pulling teeth. Yes, yes, a deliberate metaphor: she works as a school dental technician. She had joined OS 30 years earlier, in 1976, wanting something to keep her mind and body fit. Other birders could certainly vouch for the latter: back then, as a younger woman with a most pleasing figure, she had caused something of a scandal when she showed up at beach expeditions wearing a bikini.

  She made endemic birds her study, until, she said, something happened in the late 1980s: ‘I saw the light!’ Gwen became a ‘wader’, fascinated by and in thrall to New Zealand’s migratory wading birds. Among our birders, waders are a kind of cult – possibly the most fervent of our modern ornithologists, followers of the true path. In part, it’s an Auckland thing. The city has two harbours and is nearby to a third, the giant Kaipara, all of which attracts vast numbers of wading birds. Actually, the birds turn up all over the shop, at coasts and tidal estuaries in both the North and South Islands.

  These migratory wading species have a special status. I deliberately left them out of the pecking order of New Zealand birds earlier, because they occupy such a distinct niche. New Zealand is a littoral nation – littoral, meaning shores. We are the land of the long white coast. Our shell banks, mud-flats, dunes, and above all our shuffling tides are ideal for a remarkable variety of wading birds. One of the great sights of bird-watching is huge flocks of wading birds mobbed together as they wait for the high tide to shuffle out.

  Most wading birds are attractive, with their long legs and long bills. The pied stilt is probably the most graceful of all, the Kate Moss of birds, thin as pins and light as… well, feathers. But there is much more to wading birds than their looks. There is the fact of their migrations. Most birds are stuck here, day in, day out, but migrating waders have a romance about them, an emotional upheaval.

  A few species migrate within New Zealand – such as wrybill, which take about six, seven hours to fly up from their Canterbury breeding spots to spend the summer in Auckland. Many other species are international, making epic journeys from the desolate Arctic tundras each season to winter in New Zealand. In her famous 1937 novel The Godwits Fly, Robin Hyde saw New Zealanders as godwits who ‘must make the long migration, under a compulsion they hardly understand; or else be dissatisfied all their lives long’. Really? It’s always absurd to talk of birds as humans, but the worst conceit of that observation is the ‘compulsion they barely understand’. Godwits understand it quite well. It’s a matter of life and death. Also, Hyde refers only to godwits leaving New Zealand. The fact is, godwits always return. They choose to come here.

  On that cold day in July, Gwen led me across the dunes at Omaha. She stopped now and then to roll up a cigarette; no wonder we hung out together – she was the only birder I met who smoked. It began to rain, a stiff wind rose up, but Gwen was in bright spirits. It was the school holidays, and this was a precious chance for her to get out during the week. Soon, she had found what I wanted to see. That afternoon was the first time I ever laid eyes on a godwit.

  Six of them, juveniles, content to stay in New Zealand over winter, long-legged, plump, and probing their long, sensitive bills into the tide line. Next autumn they might leave New Zealand on the mass, epic migration. They were a fabulous sight. It was, actually, a moving experience. I felt some kind of deep connection with the birding tribe now that I had seen a godwit. I thought of all the other eyes that had watched this bird, studied it, marvelled at it. As for the bird itself – a dull, scruffy thing, to be honest, but that wasn’t any more the point than if it had been decked out in its vivid red breeding plumage. Again, even more deeply, I felt moved, and it was to lay eyes on a bird that lived half the year in just about the most remote part of the world, the Arctic, and the other half in the remoteness of these lazy sensual isles.

  Also that day Gwen counted 61 New Zealand dotterels, already in their breeding stripes: ‘If we’re quiet,’ whispered Gwen, ‘we’ll see copulation.’ Among the flock at the tide was one wrybill, a fascinating little bird with its unique feature – it’s the only bird in the world that has a bill that curves sideways, to the right. There are only an estimated 5000 wrybill in New Zealand, which is to say there are only an estimated 5000 wrybill in the world.

  What a magnificent day that was. I felt like I had been introduced to another kind of New Zealand – a particular New Zealand geography, another kind of New Zealand history, a different New Zealand story. Godwit, dotterel, wrybill: now I had seen them, now I had looked at them long and swooningly through my bins and Gwen’s scope, I felt changed, enriched.

  For Gwen, it was just another opportunity to count. Keeping count is what birders do; numbers are their shared language. It’s a vital exercise, because it keeps track of bird populations and movements. Her particular passion, though, was fairy terns. A rare and endangered species, there are less than 40 fairy terns remaining in New Zealand. (A chick on the Kaipara Harbour would later, in the summer of 2007, be successfully fledged and ready to fly, the first such event in five years.) Gwen’s work to protect the fairy terns had won her the Queen’s Service Medal. She told me something of her dramas. There was the day a fairy tern egg was about to be washed away by the tide, but she saved the unborn chick by placing the egg in a wide-necked soup flask. There was the day she staged a sit-in at the Department of Conservation offices.

  And there was the fairy tern nest she found one day on the beach at Waipu. Like most shore birds, the fairy tern lays its eggs in a scrape in the sand. That night, there was a party on the beach, a bonfire, a game of cricket… She watched on helplessly, and got up at dawn to find a line in the sand – well bowled, sir – where the nest had been. ‘I sunk to my knees and cried,’ she told me. ‘I thought, surely everyone has a right to raise a family.’ Dear Gwen. Of course I knew she would be happy when I told her my news.

  Caspian Tern chick, four days old

  Little wing

  BY NOW IT ought to be blaringly obvious – apologies for the coyness – what I have been getting at with so many hints, so much moist sentimental clucking, about something amazing that happened along the way during my year of birds. Emily phoned one morning while I was at my desk. I work from home. She had unexpected news. I said, ‘Just come over!’ I sat out on the back porch waiting for her. It was a warm, bright winter’s day. I wept with happiness and smoked my head off. Emily arrived. She trembled with happiness. There was sunlight on her face. She said, ‘Get that smoke away from me! I’m carrying our baby.’

  Our baby. A new life, someone else, someone we hadn’t planned, someone we wanted, and immediately, giddily, cherished. I thought: I love you, whoever you are. For the first time in my life I felt set free. I imagined our baby, and thought: you are my life. Please, take as much as you want.

  Emily – suddenly, she was the mother of my child – went back to work. Dazed and amazed, suddenly fiercely protective, I wandered down to the bay. There were those other parents-in-waiting, the pair of white-faced herons – up to five pale blue-green eggs would hatch in the spring. On that winter’s day, at high tide, they were in lazy flight, their long, supple necks tucked close to their chest. There were six pied shags and one little shag on the
pier. It was true about the pied shags, that they dive underwater for 25 to 30 seconds, and rest for no longer than ten seconds before their next fishing trip.

  Back home, sitting at my desk, I gazed at the silvereyes scoffing every morsel of fruit on the guava tree outside my window. At head-height in the fork of a thin tree a few houses up the road, I found a thick nest, like a cup, very tightly made from twigs and dry grass – quite likely a goldfinch or chaffinch, which sometimes also raided the guavas.

  Birds, everywhere, scattered all around, the air full of feathers and cries, a new kind of New Zealand emerging in front of my eyes as I wandered through the first tender and ecstatic days of Emily’s news. I looked at the red, hard, almost reptilian feet of the red-billed gull; heard the blackbirds break their autumnal silence and begin to sing in late July; went to the zoo and was terribly pleased with myself for being able to identify non-captive yellowhammers eating the hayseeds thrown about by Fudge, the neutered hippo (and even more excited to notice that welcome swallows had moved in, and built a nest beneath a footbridge); and followed a flock of spur-winged plovers one afternoon across a damp field near the harbour bridge, in the hope of finding a nest. The Field Guide had said, ‘Laying is from June till late November. Several clutches are laid each year. The preferred site is a flat, wet area with some surface irregularity and a wide outlook. The nest is a scrape in the ground. They lay 1 to 4 khaki eggs with brownish-black spots.’

  There were more outings with Gwen, to that most alluring hotspot for a birder: a sewage pond. Lagoons and shell banks had been restored to the 500 hectares of dewatered sludge at the former oxidation ponds at Mangere, and were a haven for shore birds and waterfowl. We saw juvenile bar-tailed godwits, already showing a lovely red tint to their bodies in preparation for the breeding season. There were SIPOs and New Zealand dotterels.

  ‘Look,’ said Gwen, ‘a scarf of wrybill.’ She pointed out a flock of about 140 birds coming into land – wrybill really do fly in the shape of a scarf flung in the air. There were pied stilts. ‘Look,’ said Gwen, and among the flock of pied stilt at the water’s edge, she picked out a solitary black stilt. The rare black stilt. There are only about 70 left in New Zealand, making it one of the most threatened shore birds in the world, according to British-based BirdLife International.

  And there were what I had hoped to see at the ponds – royal spoonbill, one of the most striking birds in New Zealand, graceful with its long black legs, its snow-white, radiant plumage, and the way it flies with its neck stuck out, but made preposterous with that great big ungainly spoon sticking out of its face. It’s another modern self-introduced Australian bird, and began breeding here in 1947. There was a flock of 72 at Mangere. They waited for the tide to recede, until, one by one, they stalked into the water and spent a good 20 minutes bathing before feeding. It was moulting season; you could see a bloody red where the feathers were coming through. Most stood on the shell bank in classic wader pose, on one leg, but a few sat, folding their legs beneath them like a bundle of sticks.

  Gwen and I sat watching the spoonbills nearby, nibbling at sandwiches and drinking thermos coffee provided by John Simmons, an OS member who had also come along for the day. John was 72 and another English birder; he had emigrated here with the wife and kids after giving up his job as a fireman with the Hertfordshire brigade. He said, ‘They were mad down at the fire station. They said, “What are you going to do in New Zealand?” I said, “Milk at four cents a pint, I could live on rice puddings till I get myself sorted.” But it turned out fine.’

  After his wife passed away 12 years ago, he took up an interest in birds – in part, inspired by reading something in a book called The Young Pathfinders Book of Birds. When I phoned him later and asked him about the book, he said, ‘I’m looking at it right now. Here we go: “Many birds eat particular foods, and go about their food-gathering in unusual ways. The chicken-sized kiwi of New Zealand delights in perhaps the strangest food of all. The kiwi loves to gobble a certain long phosphorescent worm. It doesn’t seem to mind that the worm, 12 to 20 inches long, makes its whole bill glow like a light bulb. For a long while after the meal, until all the effects of the worm wear off, the kiwi’s bill keeps glowing.” The first time I read that I thought, that’s going a bit far.’

  John and Gwen shared the kind of dialogue only birders can speak. Example: ‘Brian was asking me about the state of a spoonbill in my freezer.’ They could perform endless varieties of these dead-bird sketches: John served as the Auckland OS beach patrol coordinator, in charge of volunteers who devoted one Saturday each month to combing 30-kilometre stretches of Muriwai Beach in search of storm-cast sea birds washed up on the shore. Six mottled petrels in March, 17 little blue penguins in August and another 15 the following May, 19 fairy prions in July. The death toll could sound enigmatic, like a line of verse separated from its poem:

  10 sooty shearwaters in June.

  Beach patrolling is crucial to OS work. Every year, thousands of dead sea birds fetch up on New Zealand beaches, providing the raw material, so to speak, for an understanding of migration. The beach patrols also allow particular study of population, age, anatomy, moult and feeding. It’s a sub-genre of ornithology – how to watch a dead bird. Between 1943 and 1987, patrollers found 209,204 dead sea birds on the New Zealand coastline, as well as dead other things. John: ‘Found a dead horse once. A month later, a dead deer. Three sheep’s heads.’

  Recent rare-bird finds included the brown-phased Oriental cuckoo from New Guinea, and the northern giant petrel, whose leg band traced it back to South Africa’s Cape Town University, where the bird had been banded in 1984, making it at least 22 years old. John made sure every collected bird was properly, tightly Gladwrapped, then triple-bagged, and he took along two three-litre containers of hot water, plus detergent and hand towels. ‘Some of the birds,’ he said, ‘are long past their use-by date.’

  I can vouch that a dead sea bird stinks to a high, musky hell. One night, when Gwen drove me out to the South Auckland OS meeting at the croquet club-rooms, someone brought along a fairy prion. Its blue-black bill was at right angles, the top pointing left, the bottom pointing right, and a most interesting discussion ensued as to whether this was a freak mutation, or a car had run over it. Later, as a university research student gave a talk on the perplexing rate of breeding failure among the little blue penguin on Tiritiri Matangi Island, my mind kept wandering back to the fairy prion – partly because of its distinctive stink, but also because it was the closest I had ever been to a bird.

  There are over a million pairs of fairy prions around New Zealand waters. They lay only one egg in season, in a burrow in the ground, where the eggs and chicks are hopelessly vulnerable to cats and rats – and also, on Stephens Island, to tuatara. All I really knew, though, was how tiny it was, this grey sea bird with a twisted bill and blue legs, all of it quite dead, inside a plastic shopping bag from Foodtown on a table in a croquet club-room in Papakura. It had felt hollowed out in my hand, almost weightless, as though it only contained sea salt and sea air.

  I chatted to Ian Southey that night. A few days later he invited me out birding on the Kaipara Harbour; he picked me up one Sunday for a long and rewarding day on possibly the bleakest stretch of inland tide in the country. Fit and somewhere in his thirties, he advertised he meant business as soon as he parked the car, stripping down to a pair of shorts and bare feet, even though it was a cold winter’s day, raked by a sea breeze.

  Ian’s list of species he had seen in his life was about 230; he didn’t keep count, it wasn’t his thing. He was a serious student of birds – that year he worked on the dunlin, and would later post an email on the popular BIRDING-NZ internet newsgroup, excitedly describing his Department of Conservation survey work on forest yellowheads in Otago’s Dart River: ‘You should be here!’

  He brought along a spare scope to our day on the Kaipara, and we trudged for hours along a black damp tundra, stopping here and there to inspect and to count: 161 SIPOs
, 125 bar-tailed godwits, 71 New Zealand dotterels, 61 banded dotterels, plus two species of Arctic breeders, probably juveniles, wintering in New Zealand – 25 orange-legged turnstones, and 541 knots.

  The day included a rare find. Ian picked out the terek sandpiper, a voracious feeder with its delicately upturned bill. I smiled to see this scarce visitor to our shores, because I had just finished reading Mark Obascik’s modern classic The Big Year, his captivating account of three US twitchers who fiercely competed to find the most species in North America in 1998. Towards the end of that year, the numbers were close. New Jersey industrial contractor Sandy Komino was on 703, retired chemical company executive Al Levantin had 663, and the dark horse, Greg Miller, a lonely, divorced, broke, overweight nuclear-power worker from Maryland, could count 658. Obascik: ‘After a four-day, 6500-mile sweep of the Pacific Northwest, Komino returned home to a jarring phone call. Turn around right now and come back, the caller told him. There’s a terek sandpiper working the surf in Anchorage.’ Naturally, Komino did as he was told.

  All that, just for one bird which fed its greedy face along the tideline on an unremarkable winter’s day in the Kaipara Harbour, the distant tide holding its breath, the vast gloopy softness of mud-flats, at another end of the world.