Where Cuckoos Call (5 page)

For a while I just lay there, shaking. Then the crying started:
gently at first and, later, great body-shaking sobs. My cheek was sore and probably bruised, but that was not why I cried. I cried for the hurt inside. I cried for the father I had once known. I cried for all the changes that were happening in my life.

And I cried, because deep down I doubted that I could do anything to stop them.

That season ended up being the best breeding time ever.

In early December, Wiltshire put in a huge brick gateway out at the road, complete with large wrought-iron gates. Mum said it was all part of presenting Pacific Keys as an exclusive development; it showed that we intended to keep out the riff-raff. It worked. We hardly had any people bringing their vehicles onto the beach that summer.

However, the main thing that made it a great season was the weather. It rained all summer long. For week after week, large anticyclones would park to the northeast of New Zealand. Their winds dragged warm, moist air from the tropics onto New Zealand where it was dumped as rain. Almost every night the news would have some expert trying to explain what was happening and why. We heard of La Niña, El Niño, Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, global warming, even sunspots. Yet none of it made much sense, and it didn’t stop the rain from falling.

Summer holidays were a washout. People just stopped going to beaches, especially on the Coromandel Peninsula. And no people meant no annoying visitors to the sand spit in Mansfield Bay.

The birds didn’t mind the rain. Quite the opposite. It was so wet that seeds germinated in the sand, producing plants where I had never seen any before. And with the plants and the rain came the insects, hordes of them. Chicks would hatch and have a source of food right by the nest. I saw more chicks that season than ever before.

When I did my totals at the end of the season, I had hatched thirty-four oystercatchers, twelve terns and a record seventeen dotterels. I’ve no idea how many made it through to adulthood,
but judging by the number of birds feeding in the estuary most of them had.

I also had record numbers of godwits with a hundred and twelve at the height of the season. Not only did the rain grow plants, it kept the sand moist, encouraging the growth of seaworms, crabs, seaweeds and shellfish. There was plenty of food for everybody.

I documented it all with my camera. The pictures showed how the birds would be almost every season if they weren’t disturbed by man and his animals. I had no idea what I might do with the photo record; I was just doing what Cole had suggested—looking after the birds and hoping for a miracle.

Cole had made a good start to the rugby season. The Highlanders had won all of their home games and lost only two of the others. A lot of the success was being credited to Cole’s role as leader of the forwards. The TV news had even suggested that he might become an All Black that year.

I don’t know how he found time to keep sending me emails, but he did. One in particular did a lot to give me hope.

Kia ora Ben,

Hey, what do you call a woodpecker without a beak?

A headbanger!

Ha! Ha!

Back in November your emails were all doom and gloom. Now you say it’s the best summer ever. See how quickly things can change? The same could happen with your father. And I’ve got a suggestion that may help. You told me that he’d stopped taking his medication and that may have been the reason he
hit you. Well, I saw a gadget in a chemist’s the other day. It’s just a simple plastic container that helps people take the right pills at the right times. Buy one and give it to him as a gift. Then if it’s kept where everyone can see, you’ll know when he’s forgotten to take his pills and be able to remind him.

Just a suggestion, but I hope it might help.

Knock, knock!

Who’s there?

Cook!

Cook who?

Cuckoo to you too.

Ka kite,

Cole

Next time we were in Thames, I bought one of the gadgets and a funny ‘Hope you get better’ card. I wrapped it up neatly and then waited for an opportunity to give it to Dad. Now that he was back on the pills he was more stable, but still things were not good between us. We had hardly spoken to each other all summer. While there had been no mention of Bigmouth or the fight over her, the issue was always there, hanging in the background.

Eventually I plucked up enough courage to give him the gift after dinner one night.

He looked at me strangely for a while and then smiled. ‘Thank you Ben. This is a great idea. I’ll get the pills and we’ll fill it up now.’ As he passed my chair, he gave my hair a quick rub. It was only a small thing, but it meant a lot to me: it was the first sign of affection in two years. Before the illness he was always messing up my hair and giving me hugs.
Soon after he got ill, I had once tried to hug him only to be pushed away. I hadn’t tried it again since.

During the summer, Bigmouth changed from an ugly, black-pimpled blob into a graceful, shiny-green beauty. Some parts of the change caught me by surprise. The growth of feathers had been so gradual that I was unprepared for her first flight. By then she was eating ten or so worms each meal and I was supplementing her diet with other insects. I found that she liked crickets and cicadas, so long as I pulled the wings off first.

One day I was trying her on moths. She showed very little interest until one escaped. Then she jumped into the air after it. Instead of falling back to my desk she continued flying across the room and out through the ranchslider. By the time I got to her, she had crashed into a concrete retaining wall. I quickly scooped her up and returned her to the safety of my room.

She flew every day after that. At first I made sure the windows and doors were shut. I was reluctant to let her out, as I might never see her again. Still, it had to happen sometime, so in preparation for the big day I made a metal leg band.

The message on the band was simple:

[email protected]

This was my email address, punched into the metal with a hammer and nail. If something happened to her, then maybe I would hear about it.

I need not have worried about her flying away, as she was too much of a greedy-guts to go long without food. I had a bird table outside my room where I fed birds in winter. Bigmouth would sit on this table, flapping her wings and crying as if
she was about to die. Feeding her didn’t shut her up for long, though—she seemed to have a bottomless crop.

One day, I was working on my computer trying to ignore her, when her crying changed from demanding to feeding. I swivelled around and saw her being fed by a cock sparrow. She gulped down what he had to offer and then started screaming for more. The sparrow took off and a while later returned with a beakful of spiders. This was repeated three more times before she was satisfied and the sparrow flew away, presumably to start feeding his own chicks.

It happened several times after that. I thought I was observing something new until I did some research and found that it was common, and not just with sparrows: waxeyes, warblers, fantails and even tui will feed young cuckoo. It seems that the cry of the shining cuckoo is just the right sound to get the sympathy of other birds. That’s something I will look at when I become a scientist, as it could be useful in rearing endangered birds.

She was also incredibly inquisitive. Anything new in the garden would set her off—a pile of weeds or just a new flower. She’d do a dancing sort of flight and give a high-pitched call that was difficult to ignore. The only way to shut her up was to go and look at what she had discovered. Then she was quite happy and the noise would stop.

Over that time she began to feed herself, moving away from the house to look for food. Still, each evening she would return to my room to sleep. Then, one night, she didn’t return. I waited outside until it was so dark I couldn’t see. I hardly slept that night. There was a morepork calling near the house and I kept thinking it was after Bigmouth. It was even worse when the calling stopped, because then I knew the morepork was hunting or maybe eating her.

I didn’t see Bigmouth at all during the next week. I assumed
she had left and that made me sad. Yet I knew it had to happen. She was a wild animal and the right place for her was in the bush with other shining cuckoos, not in the messy bedroom of some crazy twelve-year-old.

Just when I had come to accept that she’d gone, Bigmouth turned up again. This time it was in the scrub down by Treetops. And she was not alone. There was a group of five cuckoos feeding and calling in the manuka.

I rushed back to the house to get some worms, but the cuckoos had gone when I got back. However, they returned the next day, and Bigmouth left the others and came over for a feed. From then on she would spend some of her day in or around Treetops. I left a window open so she was free to come and go as she wished.

By then it was nearly autumn and I knew that our time together would soon end. This is because cuckoos are migratory birds, and come April she would have to follow her instincts and fly away to spend the winter on a tropical island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. I convinced myself that it was a good thing. To her I was no different from the warblers or any other bird that provided food. I was just something to be used until you could look after yourself.

While the summer had been wet, it had not been windy. Wind is the enemy of all birds, especially those that nest in the sand. The wind-blown sand can cover their eggs and even bury nesting birds. Worse still is the effect that wind can have on the sea. The waves formed by strong onshore winds can travel a long way above high tide, drowning eggs and chicks.

Tropical cyclone Nellie hit on 22 March. The TV news had tracked it moving south past the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia, and on into the seas of New Zealand. Until then, the eye of the storm had been at sea and there had been little damage. As it neared us, the cyclone was downgraded to a tropical depression, which meant that the winds in the middle might be less but the effects would cover a bigger area.

I had been worried about the thing right from the start. It was the time of the year when the migrating birds would be heading back north and the last thing they needed was a major storm—especially Bigmouth who hardly looked big enough to cope with any wind.

Luckily the storm was at its worst at low tide, so the waves were not as damaging as they could have been. Even so, sea water swept over the spit turning the low parts into large foam-covered lakes. As there were no nests at that time, the only lasting damage was the destruction of the spinifex plants.

The stream flooded and, with the help of the sea, washed out its bank, exposing the roots of the nearby kahikatea. Much more damage like that and the tree would die.

It was only in the morning that I saw all of this. As so often happens with these storms, by morning the weather had changed to a glorious day—blue skies and little wind. The waves were still huge, curling and then breaking in an explosion of sound.
Rubbish was all over the beach, some of it washed down from the bush, and other stuff brought in from the sea. I stopped at one water-soaked log that was covered in goose barnacles. The creatures moved around on their long necks, opening and closing like things out of one of the
Alien
movies. Peg didn’t know what to make of them. She would push her nose forward until one moved, and then she’d jump away. I laughed at her and she doesn’t like that, so I had to cuddle her until we were friends again.

My worries about Bigmouth were soon put to rest. No sooner had I started cleaning up Treetops than I heard her
tseeoo
call. She flitted in the window as if nothing had changed. Somehow, water had got into the mealworms and they had all drowned. I fished one out and gave it to her, but she wouldn’t eat it—she only likes them if they wriggle.

I went up to survey the damage from the lookout. My wall had gone. Most of the wood was piled up at the end of the spit, with a few logs dumped behind a big dune. This was the dune that the bikers liked to zoom up and jump over the other side. I smiled to myself: if Yamaha and his gang tried that now they would get a nasty surprise. It was almost as good as if I’d placed the logs there myself.

I turned and took my first look at the estuary. The tide was out and rubbish was everywhere, but so were the birds: godwits, oystercatchers, dotterels, the lot. I was wondering how much longer they would be here when I was interrupted by Bigmouth and her ‘come and look at this’ cry.

‘What on earth are you on about?’ I asked.

Then Peg gave a gruff bark. Then another. ‘OK,’ I called, ‘I’m coming.’

As soon as I was down the ladder, Peg moved towards a nearby flax bush. She stopped and stared at it, growling softly. Bigmouth was alongside doing her song-and-dance routine.

I got down on my hands and knees beside Peg and followed her gaze. Whatever she saw, I couldn’t see. She must be sensing it by smell, not sight. I crawled forward wondering whether I should; it could be something like a ferret or a wildcat—something with sharp teeth and claws. Slowly, I parted the flax leaves, ready to pull back at the first sign of movement.

There was no movement. At first there seemed to be nothing, and then I saw a bundle of grey-white feathers jammed near the flax roots. There was a bird stuck in there, or the remains of one.

Carefully, I slid my hands under the bundle and lifted it out. At least it was still warm, although the head was hanging limply as if it was dead. Then I saw an eye move.

The bird was a little smaller than a starling with a long, narrow bill, which indicated it was a coastal bird—one of the smallest I had ever seen. I moved over to the wire cage.

‘I’ll put you in here,’ I said. ‘You’ll be safe here.’ When I laid it on the ground, it just stayed on its side. I moved some of the soil around until the bird was upright with its head supported by a clump of grass.

‘Now bird, we’ve got a bit of a problem here. I’m going to have to find some food for you, but it would help if I knew who you were and where you’ve come from. So, I’m going to have to take an ID photograph, if you don’t mind. You just stay there and I’ll go and get my camera. All right?’

An eye opened and attempted to turn and focus on me. That was close enough to a ‘yes’ for me. A short time later I was back with my camera and a ruler. ‘OK, look this way please and try to look happy that I’ve rescued you.’ Slowly the head turned. ‘Perfect!’ I cried. ‘Now, if I can just put this ruler alongside, we’ll get a profile and then we’ll be done. Oh yes, that’s wonderful. Finally, if you just relax and have a bit of a nap, I’ll go and see if I can find out who you are.
Then we can start thinking about food, though it might not be until tomorrow. But I’m sure you can last that long.’ Actually I wasn’t sure at all. Yet I knew from past experience that it’s no good trying to feed a bird until they’ve recovered some of their strength.

Back in my room it took only a short time to get a full ID from my guidebook.

RED-NECKED PHALAROPE
Phalaropus lobatus

A dainty, graceful migratory bird that is a rare visitor to New Zealand. Breeds in the Northern Hemisphere as far north as the Arctic Circle. Winters mostly at sea, in the tropics south of the equator.

Black needle-like bill and black legs. Breeding plumage is orange-red neck, with black wings striped in orange and yellow tipped. Winter plumage light grey upper and white under.

Birds found in New Zealand are thought to be stormblown stragglers.

The drawings showed that I had a female in winter plumage. That was to be expected as it was at the end of the northern winter. I was proud to have such a stranger in Mansfield Bay and was determined to make sure she survived and returned back to her home in the north.

The next morning the godwits had left. The estuary looked quite empty without them. Yet they would soon be replaced: wrybills with their funny bent beaks would fly north from their breeding grounds in the South Island, and more oystercatchers would arrive, also from the south.

Then I realised that Bigmouth and all the other cuckoos
had left too. The conditions were right for migrating north and their internal clocks had said it was time to go.

You know, there are lots of sayings that insult birds: chicken-livered, bird-brained, chicken out. They all imply that birds are stupid, cowardly things and that annoys me. Most of the birds I know are pretty smart and brave. They’re smart and brave enough to get all the way from here to Alaska.

They can also predict the weather better than many meteorologists. The cuckoos and the godwits had left because an anticyclone was to the west of New Zealand and the winds would be from the south for days on end—just what they need for a good start on their journey north.

Satellite tracking has shown that the godwits’ flight is nonstop to a stopover near Japan. Then when they’ve refuelled they finish the trip to Alaska. When they come back in spring they do the whole trip in six days without a rest. Experiments have shown that they use the stars and the sun to stay on course. But to use the sun and stars to find direction, you must know the time of day (or night) as well as the time of year—you need a wristwatch and a calendar. Birds have those in their heads.

So what do they do when it’s cloudy? It seems they have a backup system embedded deep within their brains. Tiny bits of iron that can detect the earth’s magnetic field and act like a compass. We don’t know how it works, but it would be great to find out. That’s another thing I want to do one day, amongst the hundreds of other things already in my grand plan.

However, my immediate concern that day was not how to fly to Alaska, but how to get the red-necked phalarope to eat. I had brought a spade so that I could dig up lugworms. Not too many coastal birds will turn their noses up at a delicious, fat lugworm. These are worms that live in wet sand between high and low tide. They’re easily located because they make two
holes in the sand about ten centimetres apart. One hole is a dip where sand and water are sucked in, the other has a mound of wormcasts. To get the worm you dig between the holes. I collected five of them.

The phalarope looked much better. She could now support her head without help. A website said that phalaropes get on well with humans and can be approached even when they are on a nest. She showed this as I climbed into the cage: there was no calling out or moving away, she just moved her head so that she could keep watching me.

She showed some interest when I waved a worm near her, but she didn’t take it. After I had repeated the action a few times, she opened her beak and gently took the tail into her mouth. I let go and she slowly took it in, like eating spaghetti. I tried again and she took it straight away. Soon, all five had gone. Because her mouth hardly opened when she ate, I decided to call her Tinymouth, which I soon changed to Tiny-M.

I sat looking at her, thinking what a strange bird she was. Not in the way she looked, but in her lifestyle. According to the website, she has the strangest life of any migrating bird. In her breeding plumage she is more brightly coloured than the male, which is unusual in any bird species. She also makes the male sit on the eggs. When they hatch, she heads off to a warmer climate leaving him to look after the kids. Later, when the young can look after themselves, he too heads off.

They spend their non-breeding season almost entirely at sea, where they feed off tiny fish, shrimps and whatever else lives near the surface. They spin around in circles, sucking the food into their beaks. I hoped I would get the opportunity to see this before Tiny-M headed off again. That’s if she recovered, of course.