Bird of the Year: Wake up sheeple and vote for your own flock

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THREE KEY FACTS:

Kim Knight is a senior journalist with the New Zealand Herald’s premium lifestyle team. She wanted to be an ornithologist when she grew up and her favourite bird has never won Bird
of the Year – yet.

OPINION
More-pork. More-pork. Seven kilometres from the Sky Tower, a solemn little owl is haunting my suburb.
Its blurry two-note hoot entered my street’s playlist a couple of years ago; a sound I hadn’t heard since the South Island and didn’t even know was possible in Auckland. The community Facebook page went mental.
I live between the Sandringham and Balmoral shops. Who knew there were ruru in this cumin and coriander-soaked neighbourhood? Do they ever do a Barilla dumpling fly-by? Swoop past Potters Park and consider, for the hundredth time, shitting on the head of the giant white child striding its perimeter?
Sometimes, it seems the ruru is right outside my house. More often, it is a ghost. A memory echo of the deep, quiet calm you feel when you can hear the birds and see the stars and have just played a seven-letter word onto a triple word square at the formica table of the bach you can’t believe no one else booked for the long weekend.
A bird in the bush is worth two in the city – until you actually live in the city.
When your address is defined by commuter minutes and crime statistics, it is a shock to hear the sudden whoosh of a tūī. To remember: New Zealand is a bird land.
Last week, there was a kingfisher on my clothesline. Arrow-sharp beak, poised above the birdbath. I attempted a sketch, but it came out looking like a penguin.
Have you ever seen a raft of penguins come ashore? They appear in the ocean like a dark swarm; a horror movie advancing towards a perfectly pleasant beach. Suddenly, they stand. Dozens of little reflective bodies flip up like the pages of a notebook, and then they waddle right past, like you and your camera set to night mode are not even there.
Birds were here first. The miracle, perhaps, is that they’re still here.
Of the 491 bird species recorded in Aotearoa New Zealand since first human contact, 62 are now extinct. According to a 2021 Department of Conservation report, 80 more are classified as threatened and 98 at risk. Just 37 are not threatened (with the remainder classified as non-resident, coloniser or introduced, and naturalised).
Crunch the numbers some more. In total, 137 bird species are dependent on conservation management. Climate change is having – or will have – an impact on 69 species.
This is our national shame. Some countries are learning to live harmoniously with predatory lions and rampaging rhinos. We, apparently, can’t be trusted with kākāpō on the mainland.
Voting in the 19th Bird of the Year opened today. The Forest and Bird campaign to raise awareness of Aotearoa’s native wildlife is the torch beam that has become a floodlight.
The very first competition was promoted mostly to the conservation group’s membership base and allowed for postal votes. The most recent (“bird of the century” to celebrate the organiser’s 100th) was hijacked by a global crusade from a British comedian with an American talk show.
John Oliver’s pūteketeke campaign included billboards in Japan, France, and India. It ultimately earned the Australasian crested grebe a record 290,374 winning votes (or 38,000 more than the total turnout for the most recent Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin mayoralty races combined).
Celebrity endorsements are not uncommon.
In 2010, Taika Waititi and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa supported, respectively, the pīwakawaka and the kererū. Bill Bailey plumped for the takahē in 2018 and 2022.
A 2022 video of now-Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announcing his campaign for the wrybill was no joke. According to Wikipedia, David Seymour once campaigned for the spoonbill [citation needed].
In 2024, voting has barely just opened but, according to one email into the NZME newsroom, the entire city of Dunedin – “backed by prominent figures like Helen Clark, Suzy Cato, Tom Sainsbury, Terry Irwin, and Dr Jane Goodall” – will be rallying behind the hoiho, the critically endangered yellow-eyed penguin with a mainland breeding population of just 131 breeding pairs.
Fair – or fowl? Have the celebrities (and the myriad controversies – voter fraud, banned birds, and that time when the BOTY was a bat) helped or hindered?
Forest and Bird’s Ellen Rykers maintains this year’s competition is “anybird’s to win”.
“No US talk show hosts, no pekapeka and no kicking out the kākapo. This year, we’re returning to our roots.”
Me too.
Aged 11 and I am going to be an ornithologist. In the bookcase of our Punakaiki house, my parents have a copy of Buller’s Birds of New Zealand, complete with giant, colour plates, and a protective cardboard case. I turn the pages in awe, unaware that Sir Walter Lawry Buller did (a) not paint any of these pictures himself and (b) once said that the flesh of the pūkeko was equal to the best English game.
Our own freezer contains a dead tāiko – the Westland black petrel that can dive down to 34m in the ocean but has yet to learn how to ignore car headlights when it flies back to its mainland burrow. We won’t be eating the tāiko. It’s on ice for an actual ornithologist.
Sometimes, in summer, we laugh at the dumb tourists who report poisoned tūī on the river track (the kōwhai are flowering and the birds are drunk on the nectar). At the beach, we stand sentry-duty downwind of the nests where pohowera, aka banded dotterels, sit on eggs that might be washed away in a flood or a king tide (their plumage makes them invisible to humans but not, unfortunately, dogs).
Herons parade the lagoon and I learn the difference between a cattle egret and a kōtuku, without realising the latter breeds at just one river site and its entire population numbers no more than 120 birds.
I am an adult before I finally tick the Australasian bittern off my bucket list – 90% of matuku-hūrepo’s wetland habitat is destroyed, and the bird first described to me by legendary photographer Geoff Moon, will eventually be sighted from a car window en route to interview an avocado farmer.
Last night, in Sandringham, I heard the ruru again. Calling to a mate? Looking for bugs? Canvassing votes?
I did not become an ornithologist. Three nights crouched behind a rubbish bin counting sparrows, blackbirds, and the occasional song thrush was enough. Why, I remember thinking, don’t I live in a country that has interesting birds?
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