Welcome
to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 9
Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds
What
we try to do is work without disturbing birds, and not only around nesting and
fledging areas. New technology is a big help here still, these animals are wild
and difficult to surprise especially in the centre of town and it’s useful to
keep in mind the inadvertent damage that can be done by plunging around in the
undergrowth looking for eggs or following youngsters.
What
we are trying to do is form a view of the world, as animals see and experience
it. By remaining patiently attentive at a distance, a picture of this can be built
up over time. The bonus is that animals are more like us than we care to admit,
changing and adapting to the world around them, so whatever we see is unlikely
to have been experienced in quite that way before.
One
of the great conservationists of NZ remains Scottish-born farmer and writer, H. Guthrie-Smith 1861-1940.
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| H Guthrie-Smith and friend at Tutira |
An accomplished natural historian and an obsessive observer
of native birdlife at Tutira, his farm property in the northern Hawkes Bay, he
wrote the enduring classic of NZ natural history, Tutira, while bearing witness to the tragedy of our environmental history
- the clear felling and burning of over 14 million hectares of native podocarp
forest.
As
an astute observer of waterbirds he recorded this regretful account of
stumbling over a parera/grey duck nest in January 1909.
“Unfortunately,
I came on the bird very suddenly, and she flew off, badly scared, and without
any time for concealment of her eggs…Hoping to photograph the bird herself, I
set up that afternoon a rough preliminary screen and as the eggs were much
incubated and I was fearful of losing my chance, I may have erected it in too
close proximity to the nest. At any rate next morning when revisiting the spot,
I found that the eggs had been thrown out of the nest on all sides, and its
edges trampled and flat. The blunt breaks in the ruined eggs, and the presence
of the whole clutch uneaten in any degree pointed to this destruction as having
been the work of the duck herself. No hawk or rat, or weasel would have thus
wantonly destroyed them. Had vermin been at work, most of the eggs would have
been devoured and one or two probably missing. The holes would have been of
different shapes and sizes.”
This
is from Birds of the Water, Wood and
Waste (1910) and provides a salutary lesson on not being ham-fisted around
wild animals. Yet it also provides compelling insight.
Parera
males, unlike introduced mallards, hang around their female mates after the
chicks hatch. They try to be good father's but find it difficult, reacting at first as
if the chicks have been dropped out of nowhere. They can’t seem to appreciate the
female’s preoccupation. In this they are more like shovellers and grey teal
(and some humans!) than mallards that leave their mates when they start laying down a nest. But the females are very sparky and won’t
hesitate to attack a mate if they seem to be threatening the youngsters. One icy
glare from the female can send them into a prolonged sulk. Too much of this and
it can drive them away. And though they look impressive in taking up a
guardian role like this one over a resting brood, (pictured);
 |
| Parera male on guard over female and chicks |
they continually take their cue from the female, who can spot and react to trouble well before her erstwhile protector.
Despite
the mother’s protective custody however, the attrition level of her brood is high
– especially here in the town, where domestic cats, rats, stoats and pukeko can
find their way through the blackberry to nesting sites. They will often lose a
chick (or two) over night. Yet this loss is balanced against the fact that
they are prolific breeders, and with the males always at the ready, she can put
down another nest almost immediately. Then another.
What
Guthrie-Smith’s experience appears to show, is that the females have some
insight into this. In destroying the nest herself, she has taken pre-emptive
action and here her thinking and decision-making is taking place at a very high
level, (and without the use of language). The maternal instinct develops the strongest
emotions an animal can experience (consult your mother on this!), yet she has overridden
this in assessing that the nest no longer provides a safe haven. But neither is she prepared to abandon her brood (about to hatch) to their
fate.
What
adds to the poignancy is that these animals grieve for their lost young. We
watched a solitary parera mother haunting the dune lake at the end of one
season, after pukeko had taken her last chick. Despite her own vulnerability,
and now plastered in mud, the mother refused to leave the lake bed, and kept
approaching the pukeko and their own chick as if in rebuke, in a futile search
for her lost youngster.
It is difficult watching these animals
sometimes.
Track
we were listening to while posting this -
Billie Holiday God Bless the Child
Yes, the strong gets more
While the weak ones fade
Empty pockets don't ever make the
grade
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