Sharing With Our Feathered Friends

My wife grew up in suburban London – not an environment that was conducive, one might think, to developing an interest in wild life. But her father was a bird lover and he helped her, too, to develop a love for the birds that inhabited their garden.

When we moved (in my case, back) to New Zealand, it took her a little time to adjust to the absence of the robins and blue tits and other birds that were familiar inhabitants of an English garden. But, over time, she developed an equal interest in New Zealand bird life – and she taught me, too, to appreciate those wonderful creatures.

I was led into this train of thought as, sitting on our deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean one morning, we watched the welcome swallows wheeling and dipping and soaring as they criss-crossed the sky in front of us – and I began to think about the important part that our birds play in our enjoyment of life in the natural world.

We are truly fortunate in the variety of native birds which share our garden with us. We have come to know the majestic kereru as they strip the kowhai trees of their young leaves, and the ever-active tuis as they splash in our bird bath. And a walk around our property would not be complete without the accompaniment of the fantails, joining us – not for the pleasure of our company – but in the hope that we will disturb some of the insects on which they feed. And what a pleasure it is to catch a flash of iridescent blue as a kingfisher takes off from our ngaio tree.

That is not to say that we are bereft of English imports. We enjoy the songs of the thrushes and blackbirds and chaffinches, and we are never far from a cheeky sparrow – though we are not impressed by one of the unlovelier of the sparrow’s habits – the way in which, having chased down a cicada and taken it to ground, their first move is to rip off its wings so that they can eat it at leisure.

There are other foreigners – like the quails and pheasants and peacocks – that offer us the assurance that, in an emergency, we would not go hungry. Yet other imports, like magpies and mynahs, are less welcome; they seem to see it as their duty to challenge the tuis for pre-eminence – but, thankfully, the tuis seem able to hold their own – and then there are the harrier hawks, constantly wheeling high above us in the hope of detecting an unprotected quail chick.

We love the smaller birds too – the wax-eyes who see it as a challenge to beat us to the ripening figs on our fig tree, and the little grey warblers whose cheerful trilling lifts our hearts, and the yellowhammers who search our lawn for insects, but who are often outnumbered by twenty or thirty goldfinches engaged in a similar pursuit.

We have sometimes been blessed with the visits of less common birds. We enjoyed, for a time, nightly visits from a morepork (ruru) that would park itself, as dusk gathered, in the lower branches of our ngaio and venture out on little sorties in search of unwary insects.

And we have even had a solitary visit from a falcon, resting no doubt from its supersonic exertions. Sadly, we were also favoured with a visit from a shining cuckoo which managed to knock itself out by flying into one of our windows, but which then was able to come to, and fly off, having allowed us to inspect the intricate patterns of its plumage and its elegant long tail.

And all the time, the ancient pohutukawa tree behind us is alive with twittering and bird movement; it is like a village, complete in itself. It reminds us that there is another world beyond our own – that we are privileged to share our habitat with other creatures who have an equal claim to its riches.

And, as we celebrated this month International DawnChorus Day, we reflected that this is a pleasure that is not delivered to us via a screen but is a slice of real life. Little wonder that British scientists have found that listening to birdsong brings us great psychological benefits.

Bryan Gould
4 May 2019