How to Watch a Bird Read online

  Quite. But the supply of takahe dried up, and the bird was once again written off, left for dead – until its dramatic rediscovery in 1948 by Invercargill ear specialist, Dr Geoffrey Orbell. As a child, Orbell had seen a photograph of a stuffed takahe. His mother told him it was extinct. Perhaps it isn’t, he figured… When he tracked a takahe colony in Fiordland on 20 November 1948, Orbell – and the bird – became international celebrities, Time magazine describing the find as ‘a state of ornithological ecstasy’. The bird was here to stay. Although easy meat for predators, superb conservation and recovery work has since brought the known population to about 250.

  And so there it was, in front of my eyes on a winter’s day on an island in the Hauraki Gulf, a bird whose rumoured death was twice greatly exaggerated, a bird whose existence shone with ancient history and modern miracle, now a tame kind of pet, not at all shy, an irascible picnic thief, huge and glowing and prehistoric, in full view on a grassy lawn, stalking about on two legs because that’s all it could do, with a strong red bill, a fat blue head and a fat blue body. The most prized rediscovered bird in New Zealand looked for all the world like a rare blue chicken.

  A pair of Whitefronted Terns, Tiri, 9.11.36

  The godwits fly

  A PAIR OF SPOTTED doves roosted in a fig-tree in our back garden, and a neighbour’s pet sulphur-crested cockatoo squawked out the words, ‘Here, puss, puss, puss!’ It was on a quiet street, the rent was good, and we held hands and spoke in whispers about the happiness that was waiting to enter the spare room. From the moment Emily and I moved in together, I thought: I never want to leave. We had arrived. Our baby was due in February. It was spring, and one of the first things I did was chop down a shoebox to the size of tray, nail it to a post, and fill it with wild bird seed for about 12 visiting chaffinches and the quiet pair of spotted doves.

  Our arrival coincided with another, rather more outrageous spring migration – the arrival of the bar-tailed godwits and other Arctic wading birds back into New Zealand. An estimated 70,000 godwits were on their annual non-stop flight from their breeding grounds on the Siberian and Alaskan tundras, seven or eight days on the wing, until landing at shorelines in Spirits Bay, Miranda, Tauranga, Farewell Spit, Kawhia, Tasman Bay, Avon-Heathcote Estuary… All over, here for the summer, their fattened bodies turning red as bricks until they leave in March, although more than 10,000 juveniles stay behind. I went to Miranda in mid September. I wanted to see the new arrivals – I wanted a feeling of that incredible journey, surely the world’s longest without resting on land or water.

  Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, had his own feeling about Arctic waders arriving in England: ‘After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on the upland of Flintcombe-Ashe, gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes – eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snowhills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. These nameless birds came quite near Tess and Marian, but of all they had seen which humanity would never see, they brought no account.’

  Terraqueous distortions! Genius. Poor show, though, that these ‘nameless’ birds had seen and done all that, and didn’t have anything to say for themselves. Fortunately, Arctic waders have a voice in New Zealand, belonging to Adrian Riegen. When I was out on beaches and oxidation ponds with Gwen, she was always talking about Adrian this, Adrian that. Not entirely jokingly, she called him ‘our guru’ more than once. His continued work on wading birds is well-travelled – banding godwits in Alaska, and helping to set up a nature reserve at Yalu Jiang in China, where thousands of New Zealand godwits refuel on their northward migration – and wide-ranging, with special emphasis on the birds’ migratory path.

  Adrian is a classic New Zealand birder – from England, long and loping build, wears a beard. Very nice guy, with a sharp wit. He’s also the practical sort; he works as a builder, and is adept at setting cannon-fired netting to catch wading birds on the beach. ‘You get over a thousand birds, trapped and squashed, flapping away and people running in all directions … It can look quite alarming.’

  The closest I had been to a bird was the dead fairy prion one night at the Papakura croquet club. But I felt an almost physical sensation listening to Adrian describe his practised intimacy with birds – he has banded thousands of waders. ‘Wrybills sit in your hand so easily. Oystercatchers are tough old birds, incredibly placid, but the only thing is that they crap all over you. With the godwits and knots, their bill may be long and pointed, but it’s actually a very delicate bill, and they stress very easily.’

  Adrian had the familiar bird-watchers’ confession – ‘I was a teenage twitcher’ – but his interest widened, became seriously ornithological when he got hooked on waders in 1969. He said, ‘It was seeing the buff-breasted sandpiper. These things should have been heading to the pampas in South America, and yet they were on these islands off the west coast of Cornwall. So I started reading more about waders and their fantastic migration. They’re such a global species that wherever you go, you’re going to find waders. And often they’re the same species: you’ve got bar-tailed godwits and red knots here, but you also have them in Britain, America, South Africa, South America. The more you study these birds, the more you want to see where they go.

  ‘With our bar-tailed godwits, we knew they bred in the Arctic, but how they got here, and how they got back, or which particular parts of the Arctic they used, we had no idea about really. The books said, “Oh, they go via Asia.” Well, that’s a fairly good guess. You didn’t need to be too smart to figure that was probably the case. Once we started banding the birds in the mid 80s, and getting recoveries from Russia, and China, and so on, I started to piece together the story.

  ‘And you learn that the birds are under phenomenal pressure in Asia when they stop there. People in New Zealand just don’t have any idea. You realise you could easily lose things like the godwits and the knots if their staging areas aren’t protected.’

  When I wrote my column in Sunday asking readers to send their bird sightings or experiences, Christchurch poet Jeffrey Paparoa Holman posted a letter enclosing an article from the October 1961 issue of an inflight magazine published by former New Zealand airline, NAC. Amazingly, splendidly, the bar-tailed godwit was the airline’s symbol. The author of the magazine article? ‘That old Huia swatter,’ as Holman referred to him: Sir Walter Buller. Lyrically, Buller described the godwits departing from Spirits Bay in the Far North. He wrote, ‘Just as the sun was dropping into the sea, an old male uttered a strident call, and shot straight into the air, followed by an incredible feathered multitude … There was something of the solemnity of a parting about it.’

  Over a century later, Adrian was able to say Buller got it right about the steep ascent, and the timing. ‘It does tend to be evening. Just literally on sunset. But they slip away in littler groups, 20, 30, 40, maybe 50 birds, without too much fanfare…’

  Because I was off to Miranda in a few days time to see the first godwits arrive for the summer, I asked about their landfall to New Zealand. He said, ‘I was in Tauranga in October last year, and there were about 20, 30 godwits feeding at high tide, desperately looking for food everywhere, and dragging their wings along, which is a sign they had just arrived. They’ve had them held out for over a week, so when they land, of course, they can’t fold them in, they’re too stiff, and they wander around looking as though they’ve been shot. So we were looking at birds that morning which had arrived in the night after an 11,000-kilometre flight.

  ‘And occasionally people have seen them land and not be able to stand up properly, almost like they’re falling over. Gener
ally, you don’t see birds fall over, do you? But for the godwits, it’s like getting their land legs back. They land, and their legs collapse under them. It’s something you rarely see – you’ve got to be able to witness that initial landing, that very minute.’

  I wasn’t that lucky at Miranda. But it was a brilliant outing, led by Keith Woodley of the Miranda Shorebird Centre near Thames – how it grated on him that all the signs along that glimmering, white-shell shore stated ‘SEABIRD COAST’. The point of Miranda and Thames was its shore birds, 43 species, with a summer population of about 200,000 waders. Keith was very nearly a classic New Zealand birder – long and loping build, wears a beard, but came from Invercargill. He’s an accomplished artist. He lives in a house right next to the centre. It was a rather desolate spot, a sea breeze stirring the flax, and his only neighbours were birds; and yet, like me, he couldn’t drive. He hosts 12,000 visitors a year. There is a lodge at the centre for overnight accommodation – the day I arrived, a merry group of Lionesses were drying dishes and making lewd jokes.

  Keith walked me towards the shore. As a bonus, there was a single white heron, white and absolutely enormous, reaching to the sky on its slender black legs. I could add it to my year twitching list of the black stilt, the terek sandpiper, and a very weird sighting of an albino oystercatcher. Feeding on the tide were 300 wrybill, about 500 red knots, and 1500 to 1800 bar-tailed godwits.

  The godwits were slim – they lose drastic amounts of body fat on the long voyage to New Zealand – and small, and slow, and dazed, and greedy. Their sensitive bills probed the sand for movement. They feed on crabs by shaking the legs off one by one, and then scoffing the body whole. For dessert, they eat the legs. They had come all this way – light, precious things that witnessed cataclysmal horror, curdling temperatures, terraqueous distortions, all the rest – and I stood and watched them on a white-shelled shore on a cold afternoon. It was Friday, 15 September.

  I got home at about five that afternoon. ‘I never want to leave,’ I had thought, but that night I packed my bags, and left the next day to live in another country.

  Immature Blue Crane, Goat Island, Kawau, 9.12.36

  In English

  PINK-FOOTED GOOSE. Red-throated diver. Herring gull. Meadow pipit. ‘Jay!’ gasped Bill. A moment later: ‘Oh. It’s gone.’ We were standing in a lovely copse at the Holkham country estate owned by the Earls of Leicester since 1534. It was so quiet. Soft autumn light fell on the stands of cedars and sweet chestnut trees. We passed by deer. There was a lake. And a sensational monument to Thomas William Coke (1754–1852), its base crowded with sculptures of bulls, sheep and a plough. The inscription declared: ‘It imports posterity to know that he pre-eminently combined public services with private worth … Love, honour and regret attend the father, friend and landlord.’

  Egyptian goose, grey heron, great crested grebe. Bill had prepared a species checklist for the two days he acted as my bird guide in East Anglia and Norfolk. It contained 253 birds; he hoped we might find about 100, and we got near that figure on our merry field trip. Red-legged partridge, moorhen, ringed plover. I diligently ticked them off one by one, each time consulting my copy of Birds of Britain and Europe, published by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Knot. Sanderling. Little stint.

  Birds, everywhere, in an English sky – it was a dreamy couple of days, driving through that green and pleasant land, along narrow lanes and past flat fields, towards forests, woods, copses, marshes and the Norfolk coast. Kestrel, collared dove, goldcrest. We travelled from dawn to brittle dusk, the light falling at seven in the evening, every minute revealing England and England’s birds.

  But I was already dreamy. ‘You all right?’ Bill kept asking. I must have kept going quiet. My mind was so often faraway, on the other side of the world, on the other side of life. I hired Bill’s professional services a few weeks after arriving to take up a journalism fellowship at Wolfson College in Cambridge University. I had won the fellowship as a prize. It was too good to turn down – a term in Cambridge, fed and watered and housed. But I longed to be home, longed to be by Emily’s side. The day before I met Bill, she had sent an email showing the first scan of her baby. Our baby, with a face and arms; our baby, a girl, whom we called Minka.

  ‘You all right?’ asked Bill. I was more than all right. A girl – there were her arms, her legs; there was her face, and her lips and her eyes. Sandwich tern, greenshank, dunlin. There were a lot of beautiful and fascinating birds; I adored seeing the green woodpecker, and greater spotted woodpecker, sharp and vivid, battering at wood in the tops of branches. Beside a grain store at the side of the road, there was the frankly hilarious lapwing, with its long crest shooting out the back of its head. On a beach facing the bleak Atlantic, there was one dark, tough Arctic skua, which then turned and flew over the flat sea, its flight surprisingly long-winged and elegant.

  My eyes were on the birds, the sea, and fields. My heart was on Minka. I wanted her to come here, to see everything I saw. She was on the other side of life – unborn, something taking shape. But already I was imagining her as a little girl, climbing on to the horns of the bulls of Thomas William Coke’s preposterous monument, staring at the warm, dead body of a wood pigeon that I found on Sculthorpe Moor. And then as a young woman, her aged and boring papa escorting her around the fens and colleges of Cambridge. ‘This is where I came for ten weeks while you were still in your mummy’s tummy.’ ‘Yes. You told me,’ she’d say, and exchange a look with her mother.

  I kept saying her name: Minka. I wanted to talk to her, I wanted her with me. But I was with Bill. He was a nice man. He lived in London. He was married; his wife had two children to her first husband. The school they went to, he said, was rotten, typical of what had happened to England. I didn’t know what he meant by that. I had no idea what had happened to England. I was just passing through, living in a house in a cul-de-sac called Barton Close with academics from around the world. I decorated the walls with wall posters of birds that came free in The Guardian and The Daily Mail. ‘Birds,’ said the vast Nigerian literary scholar who cooked odious pots of catfish each morning. ‘Birds,’ said the slender Italian political scientist who regularly phoned his mama at her home on Sardinia. ‘Birds,’ said the young Ghanaian historian who dreamed of drinking bottles of Star beer on the beach in Accra. We were all foreigners.

  England was another country. Bill drove on through pretty East Anglia, each place-name like a grim comedy – Chalkpit Lane, Gong Lane, Grout Lane; Creake, Muckleton, Little Snoring, Wells-next-the-Sea, Sculthorpe Moor, Ickburgh, Gayton, Graunston. For the tourist, every day in England is a history lesson. You wonder about the centuries of peasants and kings, plough and smokestack. Birds, too, form the story of that island nation. There were the early myths, such as the ‘robin miracle’ of 530 AD, when Saint Kentigern performed the miracle of bringing back a dead robin to life; there was Shakespeare as the Swan of Avon, and Keats who wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ after listening to that songbird under a plum tree in the spring of 1819.

  The greatest names in early bird-watching are English. Even the great American bird illustrator, John James Audubon, needed to sail to England (via New Orleans, where he bought an alligator as a travelling companion, though it swelled to twice its size, ‘breathed hard and died’ after only nine days into the voyage) to publish his masterpiece, The Birds of America. By then, the lyrical prose of Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne in 1788, and the woodcuts of Thomas Bewick’s 1797 A History of British Birds, had both brought about a revolution in thought, inspiring the first true wave of pursuing birds for pleasure.

  Birds as sport and food had always been a favourite English pastime, and shooting birds to collect them as specimens was so popular that it had its own motto: ‘What’s shot’s history; what’s missed’s mystery.’ But the English have pioneered bird conservation. And the public have taken to birds in absurd numbers. A figure in The Independent claimed that bird-watching in England was a
£250 million-a-year industry, bought into by an estimated 3.6 million bird lovers.

  Approximately 3.5 million of them seemed to be at the bird reserves Titchwell and Cley during my visit with Bill. It was incredible. The car parks were full, and so were the paths towards the shoreline – you had to squeeze past lines and lines of people coming the other way with their bins and their scopes and their windcheaters and their walking boots and their thermoses and their packed lunches. It was like being on the London Underground. I was dying to be in the country, to escape to fresh air, but I was already there.

  Little egret, dark-bellied goose, velvet scoter. Bill was racking up our bird count, and remained alert to any news of rare sightings: his beeper beeped all day long, courtesy of a 24/7 service that updated twitchers about movements and whereabouts. On our second afternoon, we parked near a thatched house flying a Jolly Roger flag in The Broads and joined a twitch of 12 birders to find a rare pallid harrier standing in a field. Old war stories were exchanged over the clicking of expensive cameras. ‘I’m not fanatical,’ a fat man was saying. ‘I do it within reason. Although I was up in Scotland last Christmas. Ever so cold it was. I had three quilts on me and still couldn’t sleep a wink. There were 400 people on that twitch. Ever such a crush, that was…’

  The twitch for the pallid harrier was quiet and respectful. But I wondered whether any of the twitchers were among the guilty party who had been outed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds that same week. According to a story in The Times, a group of 30 twitchers had pursued a migrant rose-coloured starling to death in Norfolk. The bird had been blown off course in stormy weather to Great Yarmouth while migrating to India from Russia. ‘They hounded him for two days solid,’ said an RSPB member. ‘I told them to leave him alone but they said “tough”. It was tired and desperate to eat, but they wouldn’t leave him alone. They weren’t interested in its welfare. All they cared about was getting their picture.’