How to Watch a Bird Read online

  Australia has given us birds such as the silvereye in 1865, and the spur-winged plover in 1932: the manager of a borstal farm in Southland alerted bird-watcher Very Reverend C. J. Tocker to a pair of ‘strange birds’. Later, Maida Barlow of Invercargill made plovers her specialist study, recording the oldest bird in New Zealand (it was 16) and writing a minor classic, The Year of the Spur-winged Plover.

  Another visitor from Australia set up shop during the war. ‘Rare in New Zealand,’ writes Moncrieff in 1925, about the white-faced heron. ‘There is no record of the nests of this species having been found in New Zealand,’ writes Oliver in 1930. The birds began breeding in New Zealand as recently as 1941, at Shag River in Otago. They are now so widespread, a familiar sight on shores, farms and rugby fields, that it’s strange to imagine a New Zealand without their yellow-toed footprints, without the opportunity to gaze through bins at their lovely plumage of pink turning to grey turning to soft, delicate blue, at the way they croak to each other at dusk, staying close to the nest, protecting a new life.

  Tui, Little Barrier

  The tribe

  A VERY GREAT SIN was committed in the previous chapter, and that was to refer to ‘birdwatchers’. That term just won’t do. It’s nothing short of an insult to people who know about birds. The correct term is birders. English author Mark Cocker sorts that out very early on in his hilarious social history, Birders: Tales of a Tribe, published in 2001. What birders do, he explains through gritted teeth, is called birding. It’s active. It travels vast distances, it takes careful notes, it does things on behalf of birds. What birders don’t do, he adds with heavy emphasis, is indulge in mere bird-watching.

  He’s right. Bird-watching is all very well, it doesn’t do anyone any harm, but it’s passive. It’s dozy, indolent. Those content days of autumn and winter at my local bay, armed with sandwiches and cigarettes, quietly picking my way over mud as falling leaves twitched in the sunlight, and smoke rose on the opposite shore from the Chelsea sugar factory – that was bird-watching.

  The trouble is that bird-watching is my speed. I lead a dozy, indolent life. I don’t drive; I can go a week without discovering the world beyond the corner dairy. My local bay was even closer than the dairy. If it had stocked cigarettes I would have been the happiest man alive. A few minutes’ trot was all it took to lose myself among the wading birds while the homeless drunk lost himself in Jim Beam and Sprite. And all I did was watch the birds, because I like bird-watching. It’s such an easy pleasure. It doesn’t require hard work. It’s perfectly innocent, even though you can sometimes cut a low, suspicious figure wandering around with a pair of binoculars.

  You don’t really even have to leave home. Wild birdseed, sold at supermarkets, is a cheap and guaranteed way to attract birds – the passerines, or perching birds, such as the house sparrow and starling, as well as silvereyes and a variety of colourful finches – to your house. Even better, the tui, bellbird, Barbary dove, and spotted dove are increasingly regular garden visitors, depending on where you live. Plant with birds in mind – tree fuchsia and kowhai for the honey-eating bellbird and tui, for instance. You could go the whole hog and knock up a bird box, and whatever happened to bird baths?

  This kind of bird-watching appeals to the nana within all of us. It’s so… domestic. A very clear line separates birdwatchers from birders, who apply strenuous thought and methods to what is much more than a nice pastime. As such, I was terrified when I first started attending meetings of the official body of New Zealand birders – the Ornithological Society, or OS.

  There is a stock image of ornithologists. It’s courtesy of the one film maker who is more famous for birds than even David Attenborough: Alfred Hitchcock. His classic film The Birds gave a fear and loathing of not just wild birds to the modern subconscious. The film’s resident bird expert, Mrs Bundy, turns up in the town’s cafe just before the birds run amok and imperiously announces, ‘Ornithology happens to be my vocation.’ She then throws out a few learned remarks about moulting and flocking. But for all her knowledge, she has no idea what’s happening. With her beret and mannish bearing, she’s cast as an old bat, bad news, an eccentric fool. ‘Birds are not aggressive creatures,’ she claims. The cook interrupts her with an order: ‘Three Southern fried chicken, Sam!’ When she scoffs at warnings that the birds are about to attack, she’s put in her place with a devastating put-down: ‘Mrs Bundy, why don’t you go home and polish your binoculars?’ The last we see of the film’s ornithologist she is cowering, traumatised and ashamed, after the birds have reduced the town to ashes.

  I got talking to a nice old dear one night at the monthly meeting of the South Auckland OS branch. It was her first time too. She had actually come the previous month, but as she had stood outside looking at the birders inside the brightly lit shed of the Papakura Croquet Club, she had had an attack of shyness, and turned and fled. I knew exactly how she felt. During a break, I went outside for a cigarette, and stood in the chill night air, looking in through the window at the gathering of about 20 birders. They bustled about with their knowledge and their commitment, confidently discussing copulation, and were more intimidating than the other hobbyists who had gathered that night in a hall on the other side of the bowling green for a class in kickboxing. I never saw the nice old dear again.

  But there was nothing to be frightened of. The birders were funny and welcoming, a happy bunch of middle New Zealanders, with their beards and their jerseys and their arcane dialogue. Members of OS routinely see novices arrive in their midst; they can usually tell straight off if newcomers have the right stuff, the true calling.

  Among themselves, there was a fair amount of bickering, jealousy, and territorial squabblings: the usual office politics, made stranger by the fact they didn’t have an office. But they were governed by an ethic of utter selflessness – they were in it for and on behalf of the birds, and worked tirelessly, adventurously, merrily, towards that end. They could sometimes, though, be killjoys, wringing their hands about the threat posed to birds by people having fun – in particular, kite-surfing, and walking dogs on beaches. One person asked, ‘Could there be warnings put on cans of dog food?’ Leisure didn’t seem part of their vocabulary. They went to work, bending their heads and backs to the task of bird study, and their attitude was: all hands on deck.

  They were very white: you could count the number of Maori birders on one claw. They were very English: eight of the OS regional representatives came from England. This figure was pointed out to me by an OS regional representative who came from England. He said, ‘It’s the same in Australia. We had a bunch of Australians come here to look at the storm petrel. Of the party of eleven, one was Canadian, nine were Brits, and one spoke with an Australian accent.’

  England is the home of birding. As I was to discover later on a trek through Norfolk and East Anglia, it strikes the population like a disease. It has its own culture, its own customs, including that famous English characteristic of forming an orderly, disgruntled queue wherever possible. The harsh light of New Zealand softens the English. It was hard to tell the English members of OS from the locals. Almost everyone in the society I met was marked by an easy New Zealandness – they were casual, open, friendly, smart, mocking, self-mocking.

  They had chosen – or were drawn to, without asking why – a subject of inexhaustible interest. There is no end-game in the pursuit of knowledge about birds. Once in, you’re in for life.

  In 2006, membership of the OS nationally stood at 919. As well as the monthly meetings, where notes and observations are shared, and a guest is introduced to give A Most Interesting Talk, members contribute to core activities – bird-banding, wader counts, bird distribution, constant monitoring of migratory habits, and beach patrols to count and sometimes collect dead birds. There are field trips, and members receive Notornis, which over the years has featured such classics as ‘An attempt to restore sex to the Cape Pigeon’, ‘What do keas die of?’ and ‘The mineral content of the faeces of the puke
ko’. And there are usually doomed attempts to get schools interested. One idea floated in 2006 was to popularise the five-minute bird count, in which you count the variety and number of birds in one spot for five minutes every day for weeks, months, maybe a year. It’s a worthwhile practice, internationally recognised, but how many schoolkids can stay still for five minutes?

  OS was formed in 1940. It nearly became extinct by its own hand in 2006. The executive was on the verge of changing the society’s name to Birding New Zealand. The BNZ! Would they approve overdrafts? It could have been worse – it could have adopted the gross modern habit of adopting a Z to its name, as in Birdenz. Members clearly had a problem with the word ‘Ornithological’ – it was a mouthful, it was unfriendly, it smelled of chalk. Worse, it had a seriousness of intent, and advertised the society’s special expertise.

  The move to dumb down its name was rejected. Good. When I joined the OS, it felt like signing up to an elite, a crack force, with its proud tradition and attitude of scholarship. Of course, I was way out of my depth. I came armed with only a bare outline of bird evolution (‘Dinosaurs did not become extinct,’ said David Attenborough. ‘They only flew away.’) And although I swotted up on issues of Notornis and even a 1966 biology text for sixth-form students (‘Of all modern reptiles, crocodiles show the closest anatomical affinities to birds’), and learned that birds maintain a constant internal temperature, alter the pitch of their song by two pairs of muscles somewhere near the trachea, and the turkey scores 93 heartbeats per minute while the house sparrow bangs away at 460, I still found it difficult to identify birds in flight, couldn’t tell a male from a female, and the helpful descriptions of bird calls in the Field Guide (‘Call of the New Zealand Robin is a soft “chirp”’) were of no help whatsoever.

  Birders talk about how each bird has its own special life force, its own ‘jizz’. I never saw any evidence of jizz. I retreated from the air to the dark rooms of the imagination. I started dreaming about birds, and hallucinated that I saw birds in words. There was the day I walked along a city street, stopped in my tracks, and turned back to look at what I thought was a really striking sticker about birds on a car window: MIGRANT OF FITNESS. But all it said was WARRANT OF FITNESS.

  As someone who writes for a living, and who probably spends more time writing than living, I was more at home in the swirling presence of words than the swirling presence of birds. I curled up with my library of New Zealand bird books. The older the better. These early authors were pioneering something important, something significant; it was exciting to watch our lazy sensual isles at the end of the world take shape through their eyes. As much as I learned from the living OS tribe, I was transported by the dead authors – the tribal elders.

  Pied Oystercatcher nests on the sand, Pakiri, 28.12.39

  Serbian eagle

  NEW ZEALAND’S most famous tribal elder of birds is Herbert Guthrie-Smith. His 1921 book Tutira, a natural history of his Hawke’s Bay sheep station, remains a classic of New Zealand writing, routinely featuring in lists of the best ten or 20 books. But Guthrie-Smith also wrote three books devoted exclusively to birds – Birds of the Water, Wood and Waste (1908), Mutton Birds and Other Birds (1914), and Bird Life on Island and Shore (1925). These little masterpieces overflow with wonder and despair at native birds: his final book, published in 1936, was called The Joys and Sorrows of a New Zealand Naturalist.

  A biography of Nelson woman Pérrine Moncrieff (1893–1979) is in the works. About time. She wore a cap of white hens’ feathers dyed sapphire blue, kept a pet macaw called Miss Macawber, and was crucial in the establishment of Abel Tasman National Park in 1942. I spoke to a few people who knew her; they all used exactly the same word: ‘formidable’. She was outspoken, determined. She wasn’t popular. She became a Wildlife Service ranger in 1947, after the department had rejected her on the basis of gender in the 1930s, when she first applied. According to environmental researcher Robin Hodge, she ‘especially wanted to chase up poachers of kereru, godwits and other protected birds.’

  As the author of the nifty and best-selling field guide New Zealand Birds and How to Identify Them, Moncrieff was the most high-profile woman ornithologist in New Zealand, when the discipline was – still is, mostly – led by men. As such, writes Hodge, Moncrieff was often reduced to a figure of fun; bird blokes joked about her with lines such as, ‘Come up and see my Tits.’

  But she was hardly an outcast. Pérrine and her husband Malcolm Moncrieff were fabulously wealthy. They had servants. Their home shuddered with antiques. As in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, the study of birds in New Zealand was largely confined to the rich. They could afford the time. They were country gents, with English money and C of E credentials, people like Reverend Thomas Henry Potts (1824–88), who ran the massive South Island sheep station Hakatere, and authored Out in the Open, a lovingly composed, attentive book about native birds. He arrived from England in 1851 after making his fortune as an arms manufacturer, although back then they were called gun makers.

  Almost all of New Zealand’s truly admired early ornithologists have been awarded an obituary in Notornis. Guthrie-Smith, Moncrieff, W. R. B. Oliver, Charles Fleming, Robert Falla, Bob Stidolph, Dick Sibson, the Wilkinsons of Kapiti Island, Peter Bull, Captain John Jenkins, Count Kazimierz Antoni z Granowa Wodzicki … it can read like a book of the dead. The greatest obituary, the best written, composed with feeling and appreciation, was by Major Robert Wilson of Edgar Stead. It begins: ‘Edgar Stead is dead.’ Wilson and Stead had shared a remarkable friendship with another man, Major Geoffrey Buddle, and the story of these three birdwatchers is something that could only have happened in these islands.

  Each man wrote one book. Stead’s The Life Histories of New Zealand Birds (1932), Buddle’s Bird Secrets (1951) and Wilson’s Bird Islands of New Zealand (1959) are all beautifully produced volumes, relics of another age. All three men were monied, men of leisure, and absolutely dedicated in the pursuit of knowledge of New Zealand birds. Together, in pairs or the three of them, they travelled the country, often to remote offshore islands, on bird study expeditions; how strange to think of them charging around some of the most obscure corners of New Zealand to look at birds at a time when all the anxious intellectual blather was about finding a ‘national identity’. They found it in the air, and had tremendous fun doing it.

  They were also very good shots, especially Stead. He ordered 50,000 shotgun cartridges every year from England until his death in 1949. It’s doubtful he wasted much ammunition. Once, in Raetihi, he flushed then shot 16 quail without a miss, with rights and lefts, sometimes taking the right barrel one side of a manuka bush and the left barrel the other side. The gentleman naturalist with a smoking gun: as further evidence of his station in life, he served as president of the Christchurch bridge club, and was a world authority on rhododendrons.

  Major Wilson allows that his close friend could be ‘overbearing’. Stead’s book takes Buller to task (correctly) on a point of shag behaviour, and lambasts ‘irresponsible hoodlums’ who shot terns and gulls at the mouth of the Rakaia in the early 1900s. As well, it’s a marvellous record of 18 bird species, and Stead was a good photographer of birds, too – the best is his amazing shot of a ‘slaughter yard’, showing the remains of over 150 mottled petrels, butchered by those homicidal sea birds, the southern skua.

  Life in New Zealand is given to eccentricities. At first glance, it seems supremely eccentric that two army majors – Buddle of Auckland and Wilson of Bulls – were at the forefront of New Zealand ornithology, but there was depth and sadness to their calling. The two galloping majors were both awarded the Distinguished Service Order in World War I. Wilson served in the Royal Garrison Artillery, and was transferred to the New Zealand Expeditionary Force; he was wounded in 1918, and later shipped back home, to Bulls. A photograph of Wilson in full military dress shows him staring out from a pair of firm, steady eyes. He looks like a tough nut. Buddle’s photograph captures a sensitivity, but
he was undoubtedly brave. He lived through the hell of Gallipoli. His DSO was awarded for bridge-building under fire, and he also won the Military Cross.

  Educated at Auckland Grammar, Buddle was seriously gassed in France and not expected to live. He was packed off to a sanatorium in Scotland. That didn’t take, and he journeyed back as an invalid to New Zealand. He stopped over in Suva, where his health picked up with rest and a lot of sunbathing. Further treatment came as a patient at the old TB hospital in Cambridge.

  Were birds the final cure? There seemed something precious, even life-saving, about that bond. I heard mention of a brief, unhappy marriage in Scotland. Later, back in New Zealand, he fell in love, but the woman’s father made marriage impossible. I thought of Buddle on his bird expeditions with his married friends Stead and Wilson, and was once again reminded of Matthew Arnold’s line about birds: ‘Beside us, but alone.’ I doubt I am imagining that Buddle’s photographs in his book Bird Secrets have a strange beauty to them, a peculiar peacefulness.

  Wilson’s Bird Islands of New Zealand is the saddest book ever written in New Zealand ornithological literature. From his introduction: ‘It has been written in memory of my two companions on these island trips, Edgar Stead and Major Geoffrey Buddle, DSO, MC, Serbian Eagle.’ Of his relationship with the two men, he self-effaces: ‘In both cases I was the henchman.’ He adds: ‘Since their deaths I have reluctantly ceased my bird trips.’

  This elegiac tone continues throughout the book, an evocative account of expeditions to islands including the Poor Knights, Hen and Chickens, Stewart, and the various Muttonbird islands. Wilson’s chief subject is sea birds – the petrels, shearwaters and prions. He has such an inquiring mind, such a good pair of eyes and ears. It’s first-class fieldwork, and some of the best travel writing about New Zealand you’ll ever read.