I stalked one of the ubiquitous “little brown birds” on a recent road trip through News Zealand’s spell-binding Southern Alps.
The mountains formed a backdrop against the blue waters of Lake Tekapo but I ignored the stunning beauty of the snowy peaks, painted pink in the rising sun at dawn, to focus on the bird flitting around a low bush.
The bird promised to be my first New Zealand species, although the trip was not primarily about birdwatching, I was on my way to the wedding of my great niece.
The little brown bird, faintly painted with stripes of beige, looked remarkably familiar and as an aid to identification when I could consult a New Zealand field guide a little later I noted that it resembled the dunnock, or hedge sparrow, of Europe, a bird I had not seen in 30 years.
I was shocked to discover it was indeed a dunnock, to go with the blackbird, song thrush, goldfinch, starling and house sparrow along the route into the Southern Alps, all these birds imported from England. And among this roadside checklist there was even a species imported from Tasmania to the South Island, the Australian magpie.
The only two native birds I can safely say I identified on the first part of the trip south from Christchurch to the high country town of Wanaka was the New Zealand harrier, a sub-species of our own swamp harrier and the paradise shelduck, the New Zealand species which replaces our mountain duck.
New Zealand once boasted an amazing array of birds and I soon discovered that these were now few and far between, mainly confined to remote valleys in the Southern Alps or islands off the coast that are free of predatory animals like stoats and feral cats which have taken hold in a land once free of mammals, other than bats.
This scarcity of native birds was perhaps best illustrated when I went in search of the mountain parrot, the kea.
At the settlement of Arthur’s Pass, in the mountains west of Christchurch, a guide to the region I had purchased said that although keas were common, the sighting of other mountain species required treks into remote valleys. One vanishing species, the rock wren, was confined to just two valleys.
The kea is still relatively common, although the birds are discouraged from coming into Arthur’s Pass, and signs at all the restaurants warn tourists about feeding them. Fast-food is not only bad for parrot health, feeding the kea also encourages them to congregate along roads where they can become roadkill.
The kea might be seen at Arthur’s Pass but its numbers generally are in sharp decline because of predation by feral animals. Its muted “kea-kea” cry in the mountains is sounding a warning to New Zealanders of what can happen if they don’t protect their endemic birds. It’s also a potent conservation message for Tasmania with a unique mountain parrot, the green rosella, of our own.