Two in the Bush

by Gerald Durrell

  Our enthusiastic mood was somewhat marred, but not altogether shattered, when Jim’s wet socks (carefully hung on our improvised line over the fire to dry) fell with deadly accuracy into the saucepan of soup that Brian was meditatively stirring. However, the soup seemed none the worse for the addition of this slightly macabre ingredient, and it gave Jim one more thing to complain about, which he did with the utmost vigour.

  The following morning the weather looked, if anything, slightly worse than it had the previous day; however, we climbed, shivering, into our still-moist clothes and set off along the shores of the lake once again. Once more we reached the meadow and plunged into the icy grasp of the snow grass and sphagnum moss, and once more we found signs of takahe but did not get a glimpse of a bird. By the time mid-afternoon came the weather was getting increasingly bad, and we were in a mood of the blackest depression. We knew we should have to leave the valley the following day and it seemed heartbreaking to have come so far and to have got so wet and cold for nothing. It was not as if the birds were not there: the stripped snow grass we found was fresh, as were the droppings. The wretched birds were obviously playing hide-and-seek with us, but in that type of country and in our sort of mood, we were not feeling like playing games. Then, just after I had slipped and fallen heavily into a particularly glutinous patch of wet sphagnum moss, Brian suddenly held up his hand for silence. We stood there, hardly daring to breathe, while our feet sank slowly and steadily into the moss.

  ‘What is it?’ I whispered at last.

  ‘Takahe,’ said Brian.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked, for I had heard nothing except the splash and squelch of my own fall.

  ‘Yes,’ said Brian. ‘Listen and you’ll hear them.’

  We had been working our way along the edge of the valley, some twenty yards from where the beech forest started its precipitous climb up the mountainside and here the clumps of snow grass seemed larger and grew more closely together than in other areas we had searched. We stood in a silent, frozen, dripping group and listened. Suddenly, to our right among the beech trees, we heard the noise that Brian had heard. It was a deep, throbbing, drum-like noise, very similar to the noise that the wekas had made on Kapiti but magnified a hundredfold and with a rich, almost contralto quality about it. There were some seven or eight rapid drum-beats, a brief silence, and then another series from a bit further away. Something else moved in the snow grass ahead of us and then something else moved, nearer the beech forest. Oblivious of the struggles that Chris and Jim were having with camera and tripod, I drifted with Brian towards these movements. I say drifted because this is what we tried to do, but to my over-sensitive ears our feet were making as much noise in the sphagnum moss as an exceptionally large troupe of hippopotami suffering from in-growing toenails walking through a huge cauldron of extremely thick porridge. Gradually we got closer and closer to the spot where we had seen the movement, then the snow grass quivered again and we froze. After a moment we moved forward cautiously, for the quiver had only been some twenty feet away from us. Again the grass moved, and I shifted my position slightly. Then, quite suddenly from behind a large clump of snow grass, a takahe appeared.

  I was completely taken aback for, only having seen black and white photographs of the takahe, I was imagining something about the size of an English moorhen, with the sombre, mottled plumage of the weka, but there stood a bird the size of a large turkey – but more rotund in shape – and against the background of dark beech leaves and pale blonde snow grass, he glowed like a jewel. He had a heavy, almost finch-like beak that, like his legs, was scarlet; his head and breast were a rich Mediterranean blue, and his back and wings a misty dragon green. He stood straddle-legged among the snow grass, cocked his head at me and made his drumming noise. I gazed at him with admiration, and he looked back at me with the deepest suspicion. Presently, having examined me carefully, he bobbed his head and then slowly and with immense dignity, he stepped carefully round a clump of snow grass and disappeared. What I should have done, of course, was to remain still and he would probably have reappeared again, but so anxious was I not to lose sight of this magnificent bird that I took a few steps to the side to try and keep him in view. This was my undoing. He gave a startled glance over his shoulder, uttered a deep grunt of alarm and started to run swiftly but slightly flat-footed towards the shelter of the beech trees. He disappeared into the gloom of the trees and then all we could hear were surreptitious crackling and agitated drummings, but no amount of careful stalking on our part enabled us to catch another glimpse of the birds.

  By now the weather had closed down on us to such an extent that Brian insisted we make for the hut, so, cold and wet but happy that we had at last achieved success – however slight – we wended our way through the snow grass and along the lake’s edge. We had nearly reached the end of the lake, and the warmth of the hut was within half a mile of us (we could see the curl of welcoming smoke from the tall stack) when Brian turned and looked over his shoulder.

  ‘Look at that,’ he said, ‘that’s the sort of thing I didn’t want us to get caught in.’

  At the very far end of the valley, just appearing over the rim of tree-covered mountains, was a great, grey fist of cloud. As we stood and watched, it curved over the mountain tops and then poured down the sides into the valley with a speed that had to be seen to be believed. Within seconds the area in which we had seen the takahe had disappeared completely; within a few more seconds the snow grass meadows at the other end of the lake had vanished under the muffling grey paw; then the cloud flattened out over the smooth lake surface and came racing towards us, swallowing up the valley as it came. We got to the door of the hut as the first wisps started to coil and twist round us, and as we opened the door thankfully and looked back, Takahe Valley had been obliterated as if it had never been there, and we were looking at a blank wall of swirling grey cloud. Taking it all round we agreed that we were extremely lucky not to have been caught at the other end of the lake and so, while the cloud pressed coldly against the window of the hut, we piled the fire high with dry wood, stripped off our wet things and lay about in the pink glow of the flames, sipping whisky and tea in equal proportions, all feeling vastly satisfied in an obscure way that we had seen the takahe and cheated the elements.

  ‘Well,’ said Brian at length, ‘tomorrow we’ll walk down to Te Anau and then we can go up to Mount Bruce. You’ll get some good shots of the takahe up there. Once they outgrew the bantam they became terribly tame, they’re almost domestic now.’

  ‘What I can’t understand,’ said Jim, ‘is why we didn’t go to Mount Bruce in the first place, instead of mucking about up here, risking pneumonia.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been authentic,’ said Chris austerely. ‘We wanted to show the bird’s real environment . . . get the feel of the place.’

  ‘Well, I certainly got the feel of the place,’ said Jim, thoughtfully squeezing about half a cupful of water out of one of his socks.

  The next morning the cloud had lifted and the whole valley was as clear as crystal, bathed in morning sunshine. We collected our gear together and set off early, for it was a long climb down the mountainside to Te Anau, where the boat was to meet us. As we made our way down through the dripping beech forest, slipping and sliding on the thick carpet of dead, wet beech leaves, I marvelled at the patience and skill of the little group of men who had climbed up this almost sheer mountainside carrying on their backs a bantam to save the takahe with. I only wished, as I sat down heavily for the third time and slid several hundred-feet on my backside, that there were more people in the world who would devote this sort of time and energy to the saving of a species.

  Now that we had actually seen the takahe in its own valley I was anxious that Brian should take us to Mount Bruce where the takahe chicks, so laboriously obtained from the valley, now lived. The sanctuary is, of course, government-run, and it consists of a large and nicely overgrown area – carefully fenced – and planted with snow grass. Here
the takahes, now fully adult birds, lived in complete freedom. When we went into the fenced area there was no sign of takahe, but as soon as they heard our voices they appeared out of the undergrowth and ran towards us, heads down, their great feet thumping the ground. They gathered around us, barging and pushing and almost climbing into our laps in their eagerness to take the banana we had brought for them. Seen at close range like this their colouring was even more brilliant than I had imagined, and the greeny-gold and purple of their silken feathering gleamed in the sun with a dazzling opalescence. It was a great privilege, having live takahe feeding from your hand and clustering around your feet like domestic fowl, but an even greater privilege was in store.

  In one corner of the takahe paddock was a large aviary, shaped not unlike a half-moon. We had been so busy concentrating on the takahe that I had given this structure scant attention, beyond peering into it casually. As all I could see in it were some twigs and numerous clumps of grass, I had presumed it was deserted. Now, disentangling myself with difficulty from the takahes, who were convinced that I still had some bananas concealed about my person, I asked Brian whether the aviary had, in fact, been built for the takahe when they were younger.

  ‘No,’ said Brian with considerable pride, ‘that is a kakaporium.’

  ‘What,’ I enquired cautiously, ‘is a kakaporium?’

  ‘It is a place,’ explained Brian, watching my face closely, ‘where one keeps kakapos.’

  The effect it had on me was much the same as if he had casually announced that he had a stable full of multi-coloured unicorns, for the kakapo is not only one of the rarest of the New Zealand birds, but one of the most unusual, and though I had longed to see one I had thought it would be an impossibility.

  ‘Do you mean to say,’ I asked, ‘that, you have in that aviary a kakapo and that you never even mentioned it to me?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Brian, grinning. ‘Surprise.’

  ‘Lead me to it,’ I demanded, quivering with eagerness, ‘lead me to it this instant.’

  Amused and pleased by my wild excitement, Brian opened the door of the aviary and we went inside. Over in one corner there was a wooden box over which had been stacked a large pile of dried heather. We approached this and cautiously parted the heather, and I was staring, from a range of about eighteen inches, into the face of a real, live kakapo.

  The kakapo’s other name is owl parrot, and this is singularly apt for even a professional ornithologist could be pardoned for mistaking it for an owl at first glance. It is large – bigger than a barn owl – and its plumage is a lovely, misty, sage green, flecked with black. It has a large, flattened facial mask like an owl, out of which peer two enormous dark eyes. This particular specimen glared at me with all the malignancy of an elderly colonel who had been woken up in his club by a drunken subaltern. Apart from its appearance, which is strange enough, the kakapo has two other attributes that make it unusual. First, although it can fly rather clumsily, it rarely does, spending most of its time running about the ground in the most un-parrot-like fashion, and secondly, as if this was not enough, it is nocturnal. In the wild state they wear little tracks through the grass with their nightly perambulations, so that the undergrowth in a kakapo area looks like innumerable, interlacing country lanes seen from the air. As we filmed the glaring kakapo, Brian told me that its status in the wild state was precarious in the extreme – so precarious, in fact, that this bird might be the very last kapako left alive. To anyone – even someone not particularly interested in birds – this was a sobering and unpleasant thought, particularly as one knew that the kakapo was not alone among the birds, mammals and the reptiles of this world in being in this frightful predicament. Probably the only hope of survival the kakapo and the takahe have is in sanctuaries like Mount Bruce, and the more countries that start this kind of establishment, the better it will be.

  Now that we had filmed the takahe story we intended to spend our last three days in New Zealand in and around Wellington, filming anything of interest that we found. However, at this point, Fate, in the shape of a small man in a bar, stepped in and disorganised all our plans.

  Ever since we had been in New Zealand two things had haunted and depressed Chris beyond measure. The first was that it seemed impossible for him to get a decent recording of anything, for the moment he got the recorder out and set up, either the subject would fly away or else a car would pass or a plane would fly overhead or a stiff breeze would spring up, or one of the hundred and one things would happen that make recording impossible. The second thing was that everywhere we went in New Zealand people asked us what we had filmed, and when we told them they all said in astonishment, ‘But haven’t you filmed the keas? . . . You can’t do a programme on New Zealand without the keas . . . the Clowns of the Snowline, they call them . . . and they’d be so easy to film . . . they’re naturally tame and you find them simply everywhere.’

  Well, other people might have found these large and spectacular parrots everywhere, but up to that point we had not seen a single specimen, and this had irritated Chris beyond measure. So when this small, unfortunate man in the bar asked us what we had filmed so far, a llama-like look came over Chris’s face as I recited the list.

  ‘What?’ asked the little man in astonishment. ‘Haven’t you filmed any keas?’

  ‘No!’ said Chris, compressing into that one humble word enough coldness to start a small iceberg.

  ‘Well, you should go up to Mount Cook,’ said the little man, not realising how closely he was tiptoeing towards death. ‘I’ve just come from there – plenty of ’em there. Can’t leave anything about, they’ll be straight down and tear it to pieces. Regular comedians they are . . . you should really try and film those, you know.’

  I hastily filled Chris’s glass.

  ‘Yes, well, we are going to try,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Chris suddenly, loudly and defiantly, ‘and we’re leaving for Mount Cook tomorrow.’

  He drained his glass with a flourish and glared at our thunder-struck faces.

  ‘But we can’t,’ said Brian. ‘We haven’t got enough time left.’

  ‘I refuse to leave New Zealand until I have filmed keas,’ barked Chris, and so, faced with such an ultimatum, what could we do? We went to Mount Cook. Here we stayed in another lavish government hotel with a magnificent view out over Mount Cook and the Tasman glacier, and started on a frantic, last-minute search for keas. Everyone assured us it would be very easy; the mountains around, they said, were full of keas, every valley bulged with them. You could not park your car for fear that several dozen would descend on it and take it to pieces with the enthusiasm of mad motor mechanics. All you had to do was to go anywhere up into the surrounding mountains – but simply anywhere – and shout ‘Kea . . . kea . . . kea . . .’ in imitation of their cries, and before you knew where you were, keas were swooping down on you from all directions. Well, we tried. The day of our arrival we drove round and round Mount Cook, stopping at every conceivable crevasse and crag to shout ‘Kea . . . kea . . . kea . . .’ in the prescribed manner, but the barren terrain remained kea-less. That night, in spite of excellent wine and a delicately grilled trout, Chris persisted in looking like a disgruntled camel that had forgotten the directions to the nearest waterhole.

  The following morning, at a most indecent hour and in depressed silence, we drove up to the foot of Mount Cook, where the Tasman glacier lies, to resume our futile kea hunt. The road up to this weird area, which looks like a small section of the moon, resembles a dried-up river bed, and it eventually peters out on a cliff edge below the great glacier and above the snow-capped peak of Mount Cook. At this point the glacier was wide – a great sheet of thick, carunculated ice filled, like a fruit cake, with the debris it collected in its passage: rocks, stones, tree trunks and, doubtless, the frozen corpses of innumerable keas. Standing above it we could hear the glacier moving, squeaking, groaning and scrunching to itself as it crept forward, millimetre by millimetre, down t
he valley to its rendezvous with the sea.

  Raising our voices above the conversation of the glacier we shouted ‘Kea’ at the barren, deserted landscape and listened to it being echoed back derisively from every hand. Then, to our complete astonishment, a genuine kea suddenly appeared out of nowhere and perched on a rocky pinnacle well out of camera range. Chris, his eyes bulging with emotion, stumbled up the slope towards the bird, uttering hoarse kea cries. The kea took one look at this dishevelled, wild-eyed figure staggering out of the glacier, uttered what can only be described as a disbelieving scream of horror and promptly flew away. When we had recovered from our unseemly laughter we discovered, to our amazement, that, far from discouraging Chris, he was now full of enthusiasm at having caught this glimpse of the kea in its natural habitat. He felt success was within our grasp, and so all we had to do now was film the approach shots. By this he meant shots of the Land-Rover arriving at the glacier, us getting out and shouting for keas, and various shots of the terrain. Then, when we had our close-up shots of the keas, the two would fit together. Filming is a curious, upside-down sort of business and frequently one has to film a departure before you film the arrival. So all the camera gear was unshipped and erected and then, as it was to be a sound shot, Chris solemnly got the recorder out and mounted it on a pile of stones.