Feathers are still flying over foreign “interference” in New Zealand’s Bird of the Year contest.
The 2023 prize went to a bird also found in Australia after a surprise intervention by the host of a top-ranking American television talk show, John Oliver.
The winner was the puteketeke, known as the great-crested grebe in Australian waters, and in my annual prize for the top bird story of the year the graceful bird comes out tops.
The New Zealand bird contest has long been controversial. In 2018, 300 fraudulent votes were cast in Australia for the shag. The next year, an onslaught of Russian votes sparked rumours of election meddling, though these were found to be from Russian bird-lovers. In 2021, a bat managed a once-unthinkable ascent in a contest ostensibly devoted to birds. And last year, the organisers, Forest and Bird, a New Zealand-based conservation organisation, declared a term limit for the fan-favourite kakapo, an outsized, flightless parrot that had won the title before.
This year’s edition, renamed as “Bird of the Century” in honour of Forest and Bird’s centennial, represented the most intense election seen yet — in no small measure thanks to Oliver’s self-described “alarmingly aggressive” campaign.
And aggressive he was. The host of the HBO show, Last Week Tonight,
erected billboards on some of the busiest corners of the world including New York’s Times Square and dressed up as the grebe on television. The TV host’s contender harnessed more than 280,000 votes in a contest that had previously seen a maximum voter turnout of about 56,000, in 2021. It was a landslide victory for a species Oliver described as “weird, puking birds with colourful mullets” and a unique repertoire of mating rituals.
The competition was started in 2005 to raise awareness for native New Zealand bird species, of which about 80 per cent are threatened or at risk of extinction. But what began as a poll with roughly 800 responses in the group’s first email newsletter has since turned into a full-blown electoral race — with debates and campaign events.
The election frenzy started when Oliver’s team contacted the organisation out of the blue in October, saying they wanted to promote the puteketeke.
The comedian’s exploits included a billboard casting the puteketeke as “Lord of the Wings” in the New Zealand capital, Wellington. Along the landmark Parisian stretch, the Champs-Elysees, an Oliver banner featured the bird in a compilation of French stereotypes: smoking a Gauloises cigarette, wearing a beret and drinking wine near the Eiffel Tower. In London, a van drove around with a picture of the bird on a throne saying, “Help us crown a real king.”
Also sparking controversy was the fact the puteketeke was not exclusively a New Zealand bird, like past winners. In fact, far from the spotlight cast on American TV, its elegant mating dance can be seen on Lake Dulverton in Oatlands.