Fly My Pretties

I created this blog two years ago because I was going back to London and figured it would be a good way of keeping track of whatever travels I got up to this time. As it turned out, after a trip to Turkey and to Egypt I decided a return to the UK wasn’t for me and came back to New Zealand. My two weeks in South Africa reminded me that I should write more about my various wanderings, which I will, but the conservation side of it all reminds me that I come from a country where I can get involved in plenty of conservation stuff anyway.

And if you don't get involved, there will be locusts. Lots and lots of locusts. ...they're kind of cute, mind you...

 Now, I was reading last night about parrots in general, as I took my two year old niece to a local family-owned conservation centre in Queenstown, by the name of the Kiwi Birdlife Park. It’s a lovely little place, and it was her second birthday and she apparently has a thing for animals. Sweet as, I said, and took her to see some pretty birdies. Which she enjoyed, though she just would not touch the tuatara. You should have seen her face. 

Trust me, though -- touching up a tuatara is great fun. Closest you'll get to petting a velociraptor without a TARDIS, anyway.

 After my trip to South Africa and meeting the conservation photographer and Canon Explorer Tom Svensson, I decided I needed a decent camera so I could start to take better photographs. I have very little artistic talent, you see, but I did graphics and design and then art during high school and therefore have some understanding of light and colour and composition. However, my skills as either a draughtsman or an artist leave an awful lot to be desired. Photography takes away that need, at least – but being an animal photographer in New Zealand is pretty hard, considering we don’t have much in the way of native wildlife.

Shut up, Shaun, you don't count.

 Therefore I have been taking pictures of mostly farm animals – sheep, deer, cows – and then sea lions and whatever birds I run into. While reading about parrots last night, I realised for the first time that while I knew perfectly well New Zealand has some pretty damn crazy parrots, I didn’t realise that our parrots have a distinct superfamily of their own, with the three genera within. And of the three extant species that remain, I can provide pictures of all three, taken by my own hand.

With the kākā and the kea, this isn’t so strange; they’re not exactly common, but they’re not too hard to find if you know where to look. The kākāpō, on the other hand, is a very special creature and I’ve actually been fortunate to see both chicks, and also the infamous Sirocco – who is the one in these photos. Funnily enough, there was always one thing that intrigued me most about kākāpō, and that was that when I was quite young I read that they smell really really good. I knew we wouldn’t be able to touch Sirocco, when I met him several years ago, but I did wonder aloud what he smelled like. We were then given a plastic bag filled with his moulted feathers and allowed to breathe deep. I just about passed out, I was so happy...and it’s true – kākāpō smell delicious.

...I think he can hear you, Ray.

 Not that I want to eat you, Sirocco. You’re too pretty.

You also like to rave. And I just love a boy who enjoys his techno.

But I’ve actually been thinking about kea more than anything else. Kea are some funny wee birds, I tell you; I’ve seen them since I was quite small, being that we used to go skiing in the Remarkables and you see them up there all the time, not to mention I remember staying at Deep Cove one year on a school camp and whenever we wandered out onto the verandah, there would be a couple of kea waiting to swipe something or other.

The pretty feathers just distract you as they sweep in to steal your shit.

 The other day I was mourning the loss of New Zealand’s former self, though it’s been a pretty constant decline from the moment humans arrived hundreds of years back; though my white colonial ancestors screwed up as per our usual modus operandi, New Zealand wasn’t really designed for dumbass mammals, especially not those on a human scale. The Māori had their go, then so did the Europeans – as my recent reread of the excellent Penguin History of New Zealand reminds me – and now we’re trying to sort it out. It’s a bit late for animals like the huia and the moa, but hopefully Sirocco and his kin get to try again.

I just thought, though, how awesome it would have been to have these birds be so plentiful they just became like companions. I’d totally have a kea named Loki and a kākāpō named Colin (don’t ask). I mean, there’s a kākā down at a local aviary who seemed determined to be my friend the other weekend and I kind of wanted to steal him, and certainly I met a kea at Orana who decided upon first meeting that we were such good friends it was totally okay to steal my sunglasses.

...yeah. You can see this idea ending well.

 …this isn’t unusual behaviour for kea, of course, but the whole landing-on-my-head-to-do-so thing was a bit of a shock. I’ve had some visual of how much kākāpō weigh, as Sirocco will jump onto his keeper’s arm at every opportunity (silly little fat boy that he is; they tend to shoo him off again pretty quick), but I didn’t realise how much a kea could weigh until I had one on my head.

...yeah, I guess that was kind of a jab at your weight.

I’m still frankly amazed that our brief encounter left no mark on me, save the emotional one. They’re not small birds – they weigh maybe a kilogram – and you can see that they have large claws on their feet. Also, my little friend from Orana? He didn’t respond to either my voice or the gentle tilt of my head, and I had to gently push at him with my hand as he tried to yank my sunglasses from my birdsnest of an excuse for hair. Naturally he investigated my fingers with that massive beak of his, and…didn’t bite me. At all. He in fact jumped down, watched me for a bit, and then I left shortly afterwards when one of the maintenance staff just outside suggested he was maybe a bit too friendly for me to be in the walk-through aviary alone. Ha.

Not that I'd trust a kea without a beak either. It's the principle of the thing.

 Parrots are considered to be very intelligent birds, the same as various corvids. Kea apparently sit high up on that list, too, and after the experiences I’ve had with them recently I am developing a much better respect for them. I’ve always thought them pretty damned cool, but even as I think about conservation of mammals native to other continents, I am remembering that we have plenty of work to do here at home, too. And it’s worth it. Even if every time I’ve seen a kea lately, my first instinct has been to cradle my camera close to my chest and declare: “This is my shit, don’t think I don’t see you checking it out! Mine!”

Dude, you got LEGO, leave my DSLR alone.