How to Watch a Bird by Steve Braunias

Author:Steve Braunias
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781877551048
Publisher: Awa Press
Published: 2012-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

A hen Bellbird, Little Barrier, 25.2.48

Birdland

THE AIR WAS full of feathers and cries – all across the country. I began writing about birds in my weekly column in Sunday, and then asked readers what they had seen, and when, and where. They responded at length. The word count of emails added up to over 13,000, half the size of this book. A dozen or so readers also sent in those things written in pen and delivered in a stamped, if I have the word correctly, envelope. They came from south, north, east, west and Hamilton. They came from farmers, sailors, poets, politicians, pests, hippies, lawyers, scientists and exiled fans of Tottenham Hotspur. I was very grateful. I read every word. They gave the pleasing illusion that 800 years after the first humans arrived, New Zealand was once again restored to its original state – birdland.

The findings? Birds mattered. Birds were important, vital, emblematic of an essential New Zealand happiness. Birds were right out in front, and the correspondents reported from a distance, in the background, fascinated and observant: the sorrows and joys of so many casual naturalists, compiling a record of bird life in New Zealand in 2006.

Some of it was useful. Glenda of Kawhia reported that in the past five years the population of royal spoonbills had increased from three to 25, and this year the harbour had also seen the first arrival of two white herons. Dianne of Whenuapai counted 27 sulphur-crested cockatoos (possibly the descendants of flocks reported in the late 1960s in Waingaro, or of a flock once smuggled into Port Levy and released from a ship) in a stand of trees in May, as well as two kookaburras – quite certainly the descendants of that strange nineteenth-century experiment when George Grey, New Zealand’s two-time governor, transported wallabies and Australian birds to his home on Kawau Island.

Joan had sightings of Barbary doves on the lawn of the Philosophical Society in Orewa. Brian knew when 90 percent of the world’s population of wrybills spend the high tide on the roof at Tranzrail’s Otahuhu marshalling yards. Julia had a black fantail – the first she’d ever seen in many years of bush walking – flit from her shoulder to her head in a garden in Marlborough.

Corrine summoned the ghost of Major Geoffrey Buddle when she wrote of taking her elderly mother to the top of Sanatorium Hill in Cambridge every year from late August to late September, when tui (highest count, 19) come for the nectar of Prunus campanulata, or Taiwan cherry tree: the hill is named after the old TB sanatorium where Buddle made his recovery from gas poisoning in World War I. It was good to think of native birds gorging themselves on the spot where that old soldier came for his cure.

Robin, a commercial pilot from Christchurch, gave detailed sightings of 27 species, but was circumspect about the royal albatross: ‘I have witness accounts of a colony, other than at Taiaroa Head, on the South

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