Moturua Island Morning Sounds- Listen Here

As the New Zealand Summer Solstice approaches in December, the days begin not only early, but slowly at latitude 35 degrees south. I was out of bed, washed, clothed and beaching my beloved kayak at the southwestern anchorage of the island of Moturua around 05h15, but already the birds were in full song in a half-light that seemed to last forever as the sun made its oblique way upwards towards my horizon.

The above recording was made on the walking path that I followed right around Moturua and back to my starting place, anti-clockwise, taking an hour and a quarter, mostly at a fair pace; you now know roughly the size of this gem of land in the Bay of Islands! I was careful to go barefoot, not only so that my gallumphing mountain boots would not feature highly in the recording, but also simply to make a gentler and more observant way in nature. I have walked this path quite a few times in different years, and always perceived the shape of the walk as aural- the path rises reasonably steeply through native bush away from the beach, slips apart from the ocean sounds and into the dim and secret forest of trees and birds, insects, trickling water and breeze in the tree ferns, then back down, equally steeply to a second beach, its ocean and water and free air counterpoint melodies in perpetual motion, and thus up, down, on and past a third and a fourth beach, each in more or less the same way. There was little wind on the morning I was last there, but the windward side of the island is discernible in the recording, and also the plash of waves on the shore is quite different on each beach- one pebbly, one receiving a little more swell, the next more sheltered. Between the beaches the land is mostly bush, but there is a little somewhat open grassland on one place (just ´after´ the third beach, counting the anchorage as the first) and at the far end of the fourth beach I pass over an small piece of flatland which has some wetland characteristics and the path rises alongside it as it moves inland again into the bush. The main aural joy of this walk is, undoubtedly, the birdsong. Although they may carry the same name, New Zealand´s native birds are rather unique, so don´t imagine anything humdrum! (If birds can ever be humdrum...?) Some of the native New Zealand shore birds I saw, and you might therefore hear, were oystercatchers, black-backed and red-beaked gulls, dotterel, shags, herons, and the shoreside kingfishers. The bush hosted saddlebacks, with their strange red cheek flaps, kakariki, the wildly-coloured native NZ parakeet, tuis by the hundred, gurgling and honking and trilling away as only a tui can, tomtits, fantails, robins and many more. The wet and open land particularly features the extremely distinctive pukeko, the NZ swamp hen. Whilst the excited agitation of the morning chorus is over before the recording ends, there are still other treasures: I have a stand-off with a pathside pukeko just above the wetland area who flaps off into a nearby pohutakawa tree (the NZ ´Christmas tree´, with dark green leaves and abundant red flowers). Pukeko are extremely bad a flying, and I believe you can hear this in its somewhat agonised voice! And the saddlebacks just keep laughing at each other between the trees as the cicadas go into hiding and the general hullabaloo settles down amongst the feathered residents. You can also hear time and time again the flapping of wings! Almost every time this is a tui, who are very nifty flyers, but have very noisy wings. Becoming, quite literally, drunk on the flowering pohutakawa trees at this time of year, they hardly have need of a stealthy approach to gain their next meal...

It was such an amazing (and also amazingly normal) morning that I wanted to share it, but the best thing that happened, and perhaps the least normal as well, I have not even mentioned yet. Early on in the walk I was nearly run over by a wild kiwi bird! The kiwi, whilst being the emblem of New Zealand and living in the heart of all national feeling, is a bird that almost no New Zealanders have ever seen. This is not only because it is rather rare and in some cases endangered, but it is nocturnal, so I was catching a glimpse of it on its rummaging way home to its burrow it seems. After meeting the only meet-able live kiwi in the country, one-legged Sparky, at a bird sanctuary last year, I had a reasonably well-informed idea of who I was looking at in the bush: Wild Cousin Sparky! He shuffled down the side of the path, his long beak idly poking in the leaf-litter, all glossy light feathers and almost spherical in shape, then climbed down onto the path and, I swear, walked within 5cm of my toes before rustling off down the bank on the other side. After having made such a lovely friend of one-legged Sparky at the sanctuary, and remembering, as I will forever, how much he loved to be stroked, cuddled and, above all, to have his ear-holes scratched, it was hard to hold myself back and not reach out to share similar affection with Wild Cousin Sparky. In fact, I even resisted uttering a hello, and clearly he had no idea I was there at all, and certainly uttered nothing himself. I can only conclude that a kiwi bird must taste absolutely awful because there could be no other way that it has survived the weapons and skills of both Maori and European invaders to its lands. If you listen hard you can hear the epic and historic rustle of Wild Cousin Sparky at around 8:50 and spend seconds together just imagining this thrilling, dimly-lit and unforgettable encounter.