The tūī is a work of art.
What a truly beautiful bird! The deepest richest blues, the iridescent turquoise, the impossibly crisp white of its parson's collar. Every single time one appears in my view, I stop to admire it.
In recent weeks I have become even more of a tūī watcher, because since we moved our sugar-water feeder to a better position we have been getting visits all day long.
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Karren, who devises everything we do in the garden – I'm just the guy who follows appreciatively behind – had judged that neither honey nor the brown sugar was making the sugar water appealing enough so, a little while ago, she switched to white sugar and upped the dose. Just like that, they cannot get enough of it.
All day they will come swooping in for another sip and I have become the watcher of the water level, topping it up whenever it runs low.
One of them will first land on the beam from which the feeder hangs and give a long and exuberant call, possibly announcing “Feeder’s full again guys, get stuck in”, possibly declaring “My turn now, rack off till I’m done.” They can be rowdy scrappers, these beautiful birds.
Once it's done calling, it will hop down onto the feeder, curl its claws around the bar at the foot of the feeder and then bob its beak into the little feeder hole, take a sip of sweet nectar, then lift its head back up, dart its gaze quickly in each direction, then down for another sip, and on like this for maybe a few seconds, maybe as long as a couple of minutes and then, in a flash, fly off again.
So glad to have these beautiful birds back in our surroundings where once you might go from one year to another without seeing a single one.
So glad to see the way the very big pest-eradication programmes in Wellington and the bird sanctuary work has filled the trees and the skies of the city with native birds again. The more dire things get, the more it feels satisfying to be doing something constructive, something to mend things.
There is a set of a dozen bait stations on the maunga behind us that we run as part of a local pest-eradication group. We walk along with our bag of poison baits and our rubber gloves, topping up the stations, recording the amount of bait consumed. Bon appétit, predators, do tuck in, why don’t you. We love to hear birdsong, we love to see nature being put back in balance.
So satisfying to be out in nature, doing any little thing you can to help to mend it. So good, in fact, that it can make you want to evangelise.
How about this: why not do our tourism differently from the way they do it in other places? Why not make the conservation activities actual tourism activities? Why not make conservation the beating heart of the entire tourist experience?
Come help run a trap line!
Become a donor!
Buy the naming rights to this bird so we can fund her protection and come walk this track and see if you can spot her!
Come buy another trap and put your name on it!
Come and place it on the trail along this track.
And along the way, we’d explain to them more about what we can all be doing to mend things.
During the cruise ship season I will see people come across to our seaside village from the ships on the other side of the harbour. They will amble up one side and back down the main street with an expression on their faces that suggests they’re asking themselves when the fun is going to start. I really would like to take them up onto our bait station line on the maunga and get them excited about conservation.
I would really love to describe to them the state of these islands when the first tall ships anchored off the shore and the crew were be deafened at sunrise by the dawn chorus. I would really love to talk with them about biodiversity and what makes it so vital to keeping our ecosystem in balance, and what we can all do to restore it.
At the very least I'm tempted to say: "Come sit in our garden, I have a beautiful bird I want to show you”.
David Slack is an Auckland-based author, radio and TV commentator and speechwriter and regular contributor to NZ Optics.
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