Something shocking is going to happen to the South Island kokako. The Department of Conservation is about to declare the bird extinct.
The kokako’s North Island relative, so rare that in the late 70s protestors took to treetops in Pureora Forest to save a prime habitat from logging, has been cosseted with its own recovery plan.
Despite promises, there has been no such redemption for the South Island kokako. It has hovered on the cusp of extinction for almost 40 years. Two years ago, its official status was critical, but present in the West Coast and Canterbury.
Now DOC proposes to strike the bird off the roll and add it to the unfortunately long list of obliterated New Zealand species.
Except, no one has told the kokako. About the same time last month as DOC ornithologists were drafting its death notice, Rhys Buckingham and two of his band of kokako hunters were listening to calls from three South Island kokako in craggy West Coast country. Were they sure? “Nothing else can make calls like that,” says Buckingham.
But he was unable to photograph them, or even record the birds’ calls. This was not unusual. The South Island kokako is so reclusive it is dubbed “the grey ghost”.
Buckingham has spent the last quarter century searching for the bird.
He has been tantalisingly close. He has seen it quite often. He has heard it. He has recorded its song. He has been charmed to the point of hypnosis by its cathedral-like call. He knows where the birds live. He is so certain of his case that he took the Listener into the pitted limestone country behind Charleston where I heard what might have been this rarest of birds and even, possibly, frightened it into running for cover.
Buckingham is a consultant ornithologist and ecologist, working for such companies as Timberlands West Coast and Solid Energy. He has received the Order of Merit for his work with birds. But the bird’s arcane habits have combined with sheer bad luck to thwart unequivocal proof of its existence.
Buckingham began his search in 1979, chasing a rumour on Stewart Island.
He heard the kokako’s call, its full organ song, and he was a goner. “That first trip I was lucky, or perhaps unlucky, because I’m still here looking for them.” He got his first clear view in 1984, on Stewart Island, its long-legged, short-winged, blue-grey shape loping up the bough of a beech tree in a way no other bird can copy.
And much later, by the Glenroy River near Murchison, he got another good view of it.
First he saw signs of the kokako’s peculiar moss-grubbing. “I took out my tape recorder, played a call – to which a kokako responded with a beautiful little song.
“I spent an hour, one step at a time, stalking the bird I knew was there. And I saw it. A chance in a million. I heard a cracking sound and looked up. It was just a tree rubbing in the wind. But I saw this bird feeding, its head concentrated on the bough of a beech tree. Then it flipped upside down, a big heavy bird, its gait so unusual. It was really astonishing. And unbeknown to me I’d lost my camera. I reached into my pack to get it and it wasn’t there. I could have taken a shot of him. It was so frustrating.”
That has been the way of it. When he needs his recorder, he has only a camera; when he needs a camera, he has lost it; when he needs a second pair of eyes as proof, he is on his own.
But Dan MacKinnon, of Westport, 25 years a bushman, is equally certain. “I was walking through the bush in 1998,” he says, “and I heard this call. In all my time in the bush I’d never heard anything like it. Next day I heard it again. So I recorded it. And I saw two of them on the same day, big birds, bigger than tui, very sneaky in the bush.”
When, later, he met Buckingham, he played the recording. “I virtually fell over my seat backwards,” says Buckingham, “because it was an unequivocal kokako call, over 20 seconds of full organ song which ruled out the possibility of anything else. The recording was so clear, so perfect that the experts would have had to accept it as conclusive.”
Then the recording was lost forever in a house fire. No copies had been made.
One day last May, Buckingham, on his own, was making his way through the forest. And above his head, he heard a noise familiar to observers of the North Island kokako: the distinctive sound of a nut cracking. Then the bird called from the canopy. “Full harmonics. No other bird can do that call. At that point there was no doubt.” Except: the forest was so wet he’d left his tape recorder behind.
“For an hour I hardly moved. It called again about quarter of an hour later from virtually the same spot above my head. And yet no sign of it. It really does behave like a ghost.”
So ghostly that DOC will, later this year, dispatch it to the file occupied by birds such as its close relative, the huia. “Functionally extinct is the expression I’d use,” says DOC’s Paul Jansen, in charge of the kiwi and kakapo programme. “Rhys has come up with nothing that would convince anyone in the department that we’ve got to go in there and do something about these birds.” Says Rod Hitchmough, presiding over DOC’s threat classification lists: “The new draft lists classify it as extinct. It’s so unlikely that any of these sightings are real.”
Buckingham, though, prefers likening the kokako to the takahe, whose death notices proved exaggerated. Says MacKinnon, “I don’t care what anyone says. I know what I saw and heard and after 25 years in the bush I know the difference.”
Charleston Tavern, sole survivor of the dozens that once flourished in the town’s gold-mining heyday, serves a hefty breakfast which is tumble-digested on the old forestry road running towards the Paparoas. The track winds through limestone country, a landscape of precipices and deep holes.
This is where MacKinnon got his recording, where Buckingham and others have seen and heard the birds.
He has a recording of a kokako’s call, which he hopes will attract another, a flute-like, despairing melody as if the bird knows its fate.
“The passion for me is try to save this bird from extinction,” says Buckingham. “I don’t want it to be an obsession, but it has to be. It has become my life’s work because I know the bird is there. Someone’s got to take an interest in it. We’re losing so many endangered birds. But sometimes I think we won’t save this bird from extinction. I’m running out of ideas.”
A riroriro calls, and a tui, and a bellbird. Otherwise, the forest is distressingly quiet. Then Buckingham suddenly cocks an ear: “Hear that?” And Peter Rudolf, here to back up any sightings, heads off the track like a pointing dog. From the canopy above where Buckingham and I stand talking, a dark, distinctive shape has flown across a clearing and disappeared into the forest on the other side. Too brief for a photograph, or even to be quite certain what it was.
But I like to think it was the phantom kokako, the grey ghost.