Two in the Bush

by Gerald Durrell

  The next bird to arrive gave me a considerable shock, for it was completely unlike how I had imagined it. It was a New Zealand pigeon and it circled once round the house in fat, rather self-satisfied flight, then settled on the lawn and proceeded to feed within a few feet of me. Now for some reason I had always imagined that this pigeon would look something like an ordinary wood pigeon or, at the most, perhaps have the subtle colouring of a turtle dove. But I was not prepared for this huge and brilliant bird, which seemed to be twice the size of a wood pigeon and with a flamboyant colouring that would have done credit to one of the tropical fruit pigeons. Its head, neck and the upper part of its breast were a vivid shade of golden-green with a coppery bloom on it, a sort of patina on the feathers, while the back was a chestnut purple, again with this coppery patina. The lower half of the back, the ramp and part of the tail were metallic green, while some of the tail and wing coverts were bronze-green. The tail was brown with a sort of green wash to it. To crown it all, the bird had the base half of its beak crimson and the other half yellow, while the eyelids were red. The plumage of this pigeon, as it waddled about like an overdressed dowager duchess, made the green grass look positively drab.

  I had hardly finished enthusing over the pigeon when a tui arrived, and it was quite obvious from the start that here was an artist down to the wingtips. He appeared suddenly in some bushes, casual and elegant, dressed in metallic green plumage picked out here and there with a purplish sheen. Overlying the greenish feathers on the back of his neck were fine, long, hair-like feathers in white, and at his throat he wore two small powder-puffs of white feathers that looked exactly like a cravat so exquisitely tied that even Beau Brummel might have envied it. The tui is about the size of a blackbird, but where the blackbird is plump and rather uncouth, the tui is slender and debonair and moves with all the ease and grace of a professional dancer. Having studied us briefly, he glanced around and chose a platform for his performance. From our point of view, he could not have chosen a better spot for it was a bare, dead branch some twenty feet away from us, where he was nicely silhouetted against the pale sky. Then he gave us a quick glance to make sure we were ready, and burst into song. Now, I had heard the tui’s singing ability lauded to the skies ever since I had landed in New Zealand, but every country you go to has its own pet bird that it swears will out-sing anything in the world, so, over the years, I have learnt to take these stories with a pinch of salt. After five minutes of the tui’s song, however, I decided that the New Zealanders had not exaggerated; if anything, they had understated, for the tui’s song was one of the most varied and skilful I have ever heard. Liquid trills, babbles and croons mixed cunningly with other strange noises which sometimes sounded like harsh coughs or even sneezes. To mix these sort of noises in with its normal song and make it sound as though they should be there, was a consummate bit of artistry.

  So seduced were we by the tui’s song that we almost forgot what we had really come to Kapiti to see, until Brian reminded us. This was a flock of kakas, one of the large New Zealand parrots, that lived in the forests but had been taught to come when called. George disappeared briefly into the bungalow and reappeared with a handful of sticky, dried dates. Then, when we had the cameras set up, he took up his position near the bird table and started to call the kakas.

  ‘Come on, then,’ he bellowed, his voice echoing and bouncing among the forested hills, ‘come on, Henry, Lucy . . . come on then, come on my pets . . . Henry. . . . Lucy come on then.’

  For about five minutes he called and nothing happened; then, suddenly, a speck appeared flying high and swiftly with rapid wing-beats above the dark green forest. The kaka swooped down at the bungalow and made a perfect landing on the corrugated roof, where I could get a good view of it through my glasses. It was a very large bird with an elongated and rather slender curved beak for a parrot; the forehead was grey and the feathers surrounding the eyes started as a reddish-orange that turned to crimson underneath the eye. The back was brown, but a sort of shot silk brown with many shifting, subtle colours in it, and the feathers on the back and rump were crimson. The top half of the breast was grey, changing to crimson on the belly and underneath the tail. It attempted to walk along the ridge of the roof, in that curious waddling gait of the parrot, and once or twice its feet slipped and it had to flap its wings to keep its balance, and I saw that the underside of the wings was bright red barred with brown. It waddled cautiously along the ridge until it came to the guttering. Here its feet could find better purchase, so it shuffled sideways down the gutter until it reached a position where it could survey us all in comfort.

  It gazed at us out of bright brown eyes for some minutes, unmoved by George’s plaintive efforts to get it to come down. Then, obviously deciding that we might look better from a different angle, it hung upside down and peered at us this way. It stayed like this for some ten minutes and then, deciding that although eccentric-looking we must be harmless, it flew down in a tumble of crimson wings and landed on the food table. Here it strutted and danced about while George and I fed it on bits of date. While we were doing this, two other kakas appeared out of the forest and went through identical performances, walking along the roof, examining us from all angles, and then eventually flying down to the table. One of these latecomers was a baby, and after grabbing a piece of date he flew nervously back to the roof of the bungalow and left what were obviously his parents squabbling shrilly over the sticky offerings of dates on the food table. Carried away by his enthusiasm the male even flew up and perched on my head, much to Chris’s delight, but I soon found that to have a large and heavy parrot clinging to one’s scalp with an extremely sharp set of claws whilst dropping bits of semi-masticated date into your hair at the same time, was not my idea of the ideal form of bird watching. Also the kakas’ sharp beaks looked powerful, so I had to keep up a continuous stream of dates for fear that I might otherwise have an ear amputated. While I was keeping the male occupied, George told me the story of the kakas.

  Apparently there was a flock of seventeen birds who came down regularly to the bird table when shouted for; unfortunately the day we were there the majority of the flock must have been over the other side of the island and so could not hear George’s stentorian bellows. This kaka tea party had started off with just two or three birds which lived in the forest near the bungalow. These soon realised that the human inhabitants of the house were not only harmless but were willing to provide them with all sorts of delicacies which they could not find in the surrounding forest, so they very soon became regular visitors. The news of this bounty soon spread along the grapevine – or whatever the bird equivalent is – and so within a very short time there were seventeen kakas swooping down on the bungalow if any human being so much as raised his voice.

  While George was telling me all this I was amused to notice that the baby, still perching precariously on the roof and lacking the courage to come down and join its parents, was flapping its wings and uttering plaintive, throaty cries. The female on the bird table, when she felt herself sufficiently gorged on dates, gathered up a couple in her beak and flew up to the roof, where she proceeded to stuff them into the eagerly gaping maw of her offspring, who wheezed asthmatically with excitement and flapped his wings so vigorously that he almost fell off the roof. Four times she repeated this performance until the baby was wearing a pensive, slightly bloated expression. By then, George’s supply of dates had come to an end and the kakas, after careful investigation to make sure that we really were dateless, flew off into the forest, with the baby trailing behind, still wheezing and whining like a spoilt child.

  By now the light had become too dim for successful photography so we reluctantly packed up our equipment and took our leave of Kapiti. As the launch ploughed its way across the channel towards the mainland I looked back at the island, now just a black silhouette against a pale green and gold sunset. The wild birds of Kapiti were, I reflected, not as unusual as all that. If birds and animals anywhere in the world wer
e left in peace and knew that they could trust the humans with whom they came in contact, the world could be full of Kapitis – in fact, with a bit of effort, the whole world could be one gigantic Kapiti, and how wonderful that would be. But that, I reflected sourly, was an idea which was never likely to materialise.

  The Three-Eyed Lizard

  Yet at first sight the crew were not pleased with the view,

  Which consisted of chasms and crags.

  Hunting of the Snark

  We crossed over from Wellington to South Island by the ferry, and as we were suffering the charms of this sea voyage Brian told us that there were two things in South Island that he particularly wanted us to see, for they were both conservation success stories. One was the royal albatross colony at Taiaroa Head and the other was the breeding ground of the yellow-eyed penguins. After this, he said, with the fanatical Organising gleam in his eyes, we would visit the off-shore island where lived one of the most fantastic reptiles in the world, the tuatara. Considered from every point of view, this was an itinerary that would make any self-respecting naturalist’s mouth water, and so we landed on South Island and set off full of enthusiasm.

  As we drove down towards the Otago peninsula and Taiaroa Head, we soon discovered that South Island was totally different in character from North Island, although the difference was so subtle that it was hard to define. It seemed to me that South Island was wilder and less inhabited, and yet there were just as many farms and just as much cultivation to be seen. I think it was because you were always conscious of the great, jagged vertebrae of mountains which ran in a chain along the whole of one side of the island; even if you couldn’t actually see them, you were always conscious of their presence. For part of the way the road ran along the sea coast, and in places the scenery was very wild and attractive, with massive rollers shouldering their way in to the shore where strange, grey slabs of rock lay in sheets so that they looked like some giant’s fossilised library. On some of these rocks were small groups of fur seals, either lying in clusters sunning themselves or plunging off the rocks into such a pounding maelstrom of water that you wondered how they could survive.

  The Otago peninsula lies near the town of Dunedin, and at the extreme tip of it lies Taiaroa Head. We drove into Dunedin to pick up Stan Clark, who was the warden of the Albatross Sanctuary, and then made our way out on to the peninsula, which was a fairly hefty chunk of land, humpbacked like the hull of a rowing boat and surrounded by steep cliffs. The humpback part of the peninsula was covered with long, tussocky grass and it was here, in this rather bare, windswept area, that the royal albatross – probably the most spectacular of all seabirds – had decided to make its kingdom.

  The story of this Albatross Sanctuary was fascinating, and Stan, a tall, quiet, gentle man, told me with pride how the royals had been saved. Normally the albatross family has the good sense to choose, for its breeding places, remote islands in stormy seas where they are safe from predators – including the worst one of all, man – but between 1914 and 1919 royal albatrosses were seen flying over the Otago peninsula and landing on Taiaroa Head, as though inspecting the site to see if it would be suitable for a royal nursery. Then, in 1919, the first egg was found, causing great ornithological excitement, for this was the first time ever that royal albatross had been known to nest on the mainland of New Zealand. A certain Doctor Richdale and the Otago branch of the Royal Society did their utmost to protect the birds from interference of two kinds: from the sort of people who would steal the eggs or else stone the nest or parent birds (and the high proportion of such morons in the world is quite extraordinary), or else the genuinely interested people who, by wandering about all over the Head to examine the sitting birds, the eggs and the chicks, did not realise that they were making the albatrosses nervous and liable to desert. Apart from the human element there were the cats, dogs and ferrets that ate a good proportion of the young birds, and rabbits, who, by their very presence, both attracted the marauders and threatened the vegetation and the soil; but in spite of all this the first royal albatross chick flew from Taiaroa Head in 1938. Now the Otago Harbour Board and the Department for Internal Affairs lent their support to the sanctuary, and the people of Dunedin – led by the local Rotary Club – raised £1,250, which enabled Stan to become the warden of the sanctuary. It was necessary to fence off the area the birds had chosen for their nesting sites so that no unauthorised person could have access; this, though it may seem an irritating rule to many people who helped create the sanctuary, is a necessary one. Gradually the numbers of pairs in the colony have increased so that today there are twelve pairs nesting there. With the minimum of disturbance, this colony will increase in size, and once it is large enough and once the birds have grown to trust man, then visitors will be able to see the colony. But to allow large groups of people in at this juncture might frighten the birds and destroy the good work that has been done so patiently over the years.

  Stan let us through the impressively padlocked gate and then along a narrow pathway that meandered through the tussocky grass along the cliff edge. Far below us the sea was steel grey, wrinkled and crumpled by the wind, and skimming its surface we could see hosts of sea birds – gulls, skuas, various species of cormorant. Gradually the path started to wind up towards the high ground of the Head, and the tussocks of grass grew larger, but were interspersed with areas of quite short turf. Then Stan came to a standstill and pointed: to one side of the path, not many yards away, squatted what at first sight looked like a great ball of fluff. Closer inspection proved this to be a baby albatross, squatting regally on the haphazard collection of twigs that a royal albatross fondly imagines to be a nest. It was about the size of a rotund turkey, covered with fine, snow-white down that showed off to advantage its great, dark eyes and banana-yellow beak. It squatted dumpily in its nest and glared at us like an indignant powder-puff. As we got closer to him, however, he started to get uneasy and, with a tremendous effort, hoisted himself on to his great, flat feet, raised his wings over his back, and started to clatter his beak at us like a castanet. We had to judge our distance very carefully when we were filming and photographing him, for if we had got too close, he would have regurgitated a stream of black, evil-smelling oil over both us and his impeccable white shirt front, for this is the baby albatross’s only means of defence.

  Presently we left this baby in peace and moved further up the path, where we found another nest on a flat piece of turf under the lee of a tumble of rocks. The baby in this nest was a much more phlegmatic character than the previous one, and merely glanced at us briefly before continuing with the difficult task he had set himself for the day. The parent birds, in building the nest, had scattered a lot of twigs over quite a large area around it, and the baby was amusing himself by seeing how far he could stretch out, grab a twig and add it to the nest, without actually getting up, He had obviously been at the job for some time, for the area immediately round the nest was bare of twigs and he was having to stretch out further and further, sometimes in danger of rolling out of the nest like a down-covered football.

  I lay down on the turf just out of spitting range and watched his earnest nest-building endeavours, but soon the supply of twigs ran out and, after he had shuffled round and round in the nest to make sure there were no more twigs he could reach, he squatted there and stared into the middle distance, as if meditating some grave and important matter I found a fairly lengthy twig and, hitching myself forward cautiously, I held it out to him. For a moment he fixed me with a penetrating stare, and then he leant forward and took the twig delicately in his beak with much the same air as a female member of the aristocracy would receive a somewhat battered bouquet from a snotty-nosed village child. He held it in his beak for a moment and then carefully tucked it in one side of the nest that he obviously thought showed signs of disrepair. Encouraged by his condescension I found another twig, hitched myself still closer and offered him that. He took it immediately and became quite animated. First he stuck it in on
e side of the nest, then he decided it did not look right there, so he pulled it out and stuck it somewhere else. After two or three tries he was satisfied and then he looked at me expectantly: obviously, repulsive though I might appear, as a twig collector I had my points. Within ten minutes he had added several more twigs to his nest and had allowed me to lie within a couple of feet of him without spitting in my eye. Within half an hour we were bosom pals and he was even allowing me to re-arrange one or two twigs for him that he had got slightly muddled with (one he had stuck under his wing by mistake). As I watched this circular, fluff-covered chick working so intently at his nest repairing, it seemed incredible that one day he would be a handsome white bird with black wings and a yellow beak, floating effortlessly over the waves on a ten-and-a-half foot wingspan. In nine years’ time, when he (or was it a she?) had reached maturity, a mate would be found and they would come back to Taiaroa Head to build their nest and rear their own fluff-covered chick. Both the parents would sit on the egg and both would help in the task of caring for the baby; then, when the chick was old enough to fend for itself, they would fly off to sea, to return two years later to repeat the performance. The royal albatross pairs for life and the oldest one in the colony is thirty-five, but the slow rate of reaching maturity, the long incubation (eleven weeks, one of the longest of any bird), and the fact that they have only one chick every two years, means that to build up an Albatross colony is an extremely slow process and needs a lot of patience.