Welcome
to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 7
Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds
Shags
are as agile and impressive as penguins under water where they rocket around, but are ungainly low
level flyers and on dry land they
lumber, rocking from side to side which is why we hardly ever catch them out on
the bank like this one.
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| Immature Black Shag -Wharemauku |
This Black Shag -Kawau made an unusual and spectacular sight, a black shade with blade-like wings, dipping
awkwardly over rooftops before settling next to the Wharemauku beside the
Alexander Road bridge.
The
reason they never venture out on the bank is because of the local dogs. Most
dog owners are responsible, but that doesn’t make the birds any less relaxed around them. We can be filming the Wharemauku and the water birds will suddenly
take flight in panic, not because they mind us, but they’ve picked out an
approaching dog way before we
have. Still, in four years there’s only been one incident in which we had to go to the aid of a paradise duck -Putangitangi, bailed up against a fence.
It
was this time of the year (late summer) and the parri was a male youngster, the
same as this shag, which hasn’t yet developed its adult colouring around the
beak; nor the nous to keep away from risky public areas like this. Still
there’s plenty of food in the Wharemauku at the moment which is why they’re
hanging around. We’ve had 3 different species of shag feeding at the wetland
this summer – the little -Kawaupaka, black and pied -Karuhiruhi shags . None of these are listed as
endangered but the pied and black shags are rare though holding their own in this part of the country. All are under threat however from loss of habitat and food source.
One third of the world's shag species ar found in NZ which didnt stop a bounty being placed on them in the 1940’s because they were seen as competition for
recreational fishing. It brought some species perilously close to extinction and constitutes a shameful episode in NZ conservation history. The
expressway scientists we should also note, failed to sight any shags feeding in
this area, which is hardly surprising given the fact that they only spent 20
minutes on their local wildlife survey.
Finally, a
literary note on the shag.
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| Little shag on Wharemauku 2013 watercolour on paper Frances Jill Studd |
Shags
are cormorants in the northern hemisphere and if you know your Finnegans Wake (James
Joyce’s wayward masterpiece) there is a line that, massaged back into English,
reads something like “Let me send a cormorant around this blue lagoon”. Here the
living corpse of HCE is being scrutinized by four explorers (the passage is a
rebuild of Gulliver’s Travels) and the interrogator fishing for information. Blue
lagoons are South Pacific idylls however so they have resident shags not
cormorants, though in switching words you lose that distinctive Joycean melody. Joyce was working with a stack of foreign dictionary’s beside
him, but we can safely assume that one of them wasn’t an introduction to the fledgling
nu zilnd language. A further curiosity is that one of his sisters
emigrated to NZ, and lived in a Catholic community in Christchurch (devastated
from September 2010 by a series of deadly earthquakes).
This
post is for Pete Seeger one of the
world’s good guys, who died at the end of last month in New York. We were listening to Banks are made of Marble while posting this.
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