'The Exclusive Club of New Zealand Natives'
Can you love a bird without a border?
The other day, spotting a gaggle of kererū (wood pigeons) on the bank of the Waohine River, a mate of mine uttered one of the most Kiwi sentences I’ve ever heard: “Good to see some bird life, eh.” Listen to the warm uplift of that final syllable: we all love birds here, right?
I wrote about this bid for a national bird-loving consensus in my review of Ellen Rykers’ Bird of the Year published this week in Newsroom. The book pairs a breezy history of New Zealand’s annual avian popularity contest with short, often intense profiles of 81 native species in various states of survival. It’s a book-length eh that hopes to build a national consensus around bird conservation in Aotearoa that’s not as simple as it might seem. Love hurts, even love for birds. Check it out here—
This was a strange reading experience for an immigrant! Bird of the Year is a proudly New Zealand book celebrating only native New Zealand birds, with Rykers often playing a cheerful border cop. From my review:
But read these profiles straight through like a novel and a curious avian nationalism emerges…Rykers salutes the “exclusive club of New Zealand natives” while vigilantly policing its membership. Adélie penguins and Fiji petrels are “interlopers.” The kōtuku, tauhou, and warou are welcomed after blowing over from Australia; the banded dotterel is teased for flying back the other way. Pūkeko, which crossed the ditch maybe a thousand years ago, are “low-key Australians.” Ancestry and legal status are carefully legislated. North Island tīeke “whakapapa back” to an island in the Hauraki Gulf, while the immigrant barn owls earned their “citizenship” in 2008 when a nesting pair hatched three owlets on a farm near Kaitaia. I envy the barn owls. I flew my own chicks here as hatchlings, and we’re still years from getting passports.
But it’s a good book! The illustrations are excellent, too, and there’s a zillion of ‘em. There’s lots more in my review, including the ugly bits where this very same New Zealand once slaughtered some of these now-beloved species wholesale. Rykers had a tall order, writing-wise, and she’s produced something a good deal more interesting than you’d expect from a glossy coffee-table book. I felt more Kiwi after reading it.1 Still not sure this interloper can pull off the eh.
You too can vote for Bird of the Year! The 2025 ballot is now posted by Forest & Bird, the conservation organization that runs the contest and commissioned Rykers’ book. (Scroll down, there’s a ton to choose from.) Online voting begins September 15. The birds all have to be local, but you can caste a ballot from anywhere on Earth.
And in the spirit of Rykers’ book I’ll close with my recent bad cellphone pic of our local kererū (his kind won Bird of the Year in 2018). We’ve got five here in Greytown proper, two mating pairs and one lonesome widow. The solo dude’s been flapping up and down our street all week, scoffing seeds from the still-barren kõwhai trees. We’re neighbors, certainly. Compatriots, I’m not so sure. Can a kererū ever be a Kiwi? Can I? But no matter. I adore him. What photo, what nation, could ever do him justice? //
Great review - and the book is readily available.
It will join Ray Ching's The Huia & Our Tears and New Zealand Birds Field-Studies on my bedside table - a reminder of what we can so easily lose.
Yes we fiercely love our birds - and our bird artists.