The squawk of success

BY KIM KNIGHT

THEY HEARD the squawking before they saw the stoat. Halfway up a manuka tree, on its way to a nest of fledglings, being beaten back by a pair of angry tui.

For the next two days in late December – silence. And then the mother bird brought her chicks out of hiding and down to the feeder near Brian and Faye Narbey's vege patch.

Success. For the first time in at least two decades, tui were breeding on Banks Peninsula.

In some of our cities, tui are an aural plague. Too noisy, too early in the morning, complain residents who live near Wellington's Karori sanctuary.

But what if that sound – so iconic, that when former Radio New Zealand political editor Al Morrison left that job to head the Department of Conservation, it was the tui he chose to mimic for his final broadcast – had been lost from your landscape for years?

This is the story of a bunch of volunteers determined to bring the bird's song back to their backyards.

The country's first mainland tui translocation, from Maud Island in the Marlborough Sounds, to a patch of bush just over the hill from Christchurch, took place last April. It was a $68,000 initiative. Fourteen of the original 30 birds have since been positively identified. No dead birds have been reported. At least 12 chicks have been born. And this week – weather and disease screening results permitting – the population will be boosted by the arrival of another 30 birds.

No one knows exactly why or when tui, which occupy about 60% of New Zealand, abandoned Banks Peninsula.

A Lincoln University publication cites botanist Hugh Wilson: "The arrival of people was like a harpoon hitting a whale." Scientists refer to Canterbury's complete ecological transformation, from diverse native forest to farm and urban vistas, over the last 800 years.

Ornithologist Kerry-Jayne Wilson, writing in The Flight of the Huia, estimates since human occupation, 23 bird species have been lost from the area. Habitat destruction, pest invasion, or an avian disease? The jury is still out. While lone tui are occasionally spotted, Banks Peninsula has not hosted a breeding population of the bossy, boisterous bird since at least the 1980s.

"They're a feisty, iconic bird," says Rachel Barker, Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust co-ordinator.

"They're in your face. They've got a beautiful song that lots of people either love or hate. We find it really funny that people in Wellington complain they're being woken up by the noise of tui in the morning.

"We'd love that. I'm woken up by the noise of trucks in the morning. Give me the tui any day!"

IT WAS Ngai Tahu kaumatua Bill Gillies who first dreamed of bringing the bird back to the Peninsula. At a hui at Rapaki, he called for return of kereru, tui and weka. Wood pigeon were the iwi's first priority. In 2007, when the Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust launched the tui restoration project, Ngai Tahu was more than happy to add support.

"Me he korokoro tui – how eloquent she or he who has the throat of the tui," translates Iaean Cranwell, Ngai Tahu's conservation trust representative. He says "Uncle Bill" remembered growing up on the Peninsula and hearing the tui's song. "The sweetness of their voice... and then, in latter times, not hearing that sound any more."

This week, Cranwell will welcome the new birds to Otanerito. They'll arrive by helicopter or float plane, and volunteers will walk them 20 minutes into the bush.

"They're coming from Ngati Koati, from another iwi's rohe, and we'll acknowledge them, and the work they have done, because they were the last to have this taoka, this treasure. Then we'll be clearing the way with the forest, to accept these new descendants of Tane, back into his realm. That sort of thing."

With the vocal eloquence of the tui? Cranwell laughs. "More like a kakapo, probably!" There were no kakapo on Maud Island last week (although the Department of Conservation predator-free scientific reserve has, in the past, hosted Sirocco, the parrot that recently became internationally famous for getting amorous with a zoologist's head). But there were takahe, orange-fronted parakeets – and tui.

By Friday morning, a capture team had tagged and bagged 14 birds. A water taxi was heading to the mainland with blood samples, collected from a vein under the bird's wing and cloacal swabs (think cotton bud bum wiping). They'll be checked for disease, fed up on syrup and fruit, given their unique colour-coded identification bands, and flown to their new home.

Artist Clare Reilly is among the volunteer netters. She takes a cellphone call from the Sunday Star-Times from a DoC bunk room. The adjoining lounge is full of frog researchers. There was venison mince for tea last night, tahr curry tonight. The weather has been sparkling. First impressions of Maud? "The bird calls. The musicality of it all. It was just like, oh my God, we're in heaven."

Reilly's hand-made greeting cards are one of the many ways the trust has made money to bring back the tui. Guided walks, sponsor's naming rights ($500 or more a bird), applications for trust and grant money – $70,000 has gone into the kitty so far, and not a professional fundraiser in sight.

Reilly says she wanted to give back. As a painter, "in a way, I use the birds for my own purposes. I see bird and flight as symbolic of hope and renewal and joy. I try and do paintings with no birds, and I think, where's the life? Where's the spirit?"

Raised in Wellington, Reilly fell in love with birds in Dunedin, on summer holidays at her grandmother's Belleknowes house.

"I grew up on a windswept cliff top. She had wood pigeons, tui and bellbird in her garden. It was a magical house."

At home in Christchurch, Reilly listens for the birds visiting her own, grown-up garden. "So many times you go into beautiful native forests and it's silent. It's just devastating. If you could reinstate such a beautiful, vocal singing bird, why wouldn't you?"

FIRST, CATCH your tui. The team on Maud Island employs mist nets. Fine, black 2cm x 2cm mesh affairs, strung in the shade, between two and six metres off the ground.

By the end of the week, says DoC biodiversity ranger Wayne Beggs, "your hands feel like pincushions" – because those big male birds use their beaks for more than sipping nectar.

Beggs is co-ordinating the capture effort. "We think it's good to have the community involved in conservation. It's a win-win."

DoC conditions for the translocation proposal included finding a large enough source population to sustain the loss of birds. Maud Island was chosen because its tui live in regenerating coastal bush, similar to that at the release site at Banks Peninsula's Hinewai Reserve, where volunteers spent a summer on back-breaking pest control duty.

Bait stations, placed 50m apart over a 100ha area, targeted rats, possums and stoats.

"It was dreadful," says Barker. "Hot and dry. In some areas we were pushing through solid gorse."

They ate a lot of chocolate. Enlisted a lot of community support. "We're not the Department of Conservation, we're not a group that's done this before ... it's just a real local effort. When people knew it was real and these birds were coming, interest just grew."

The first arrivals wore tiny radio transmitters and their progress was monitored by Lincoln University researchers.

Laura Molles, the project's scientific adviser, whose day job includes research into bird song, says since their release, banded tui have been spotted in the township of Akaroa, the Peninsula's outer bays, and across the Port Hills at Moncks Spur, close to Christchurch city.

"My feeling is there is probably not a big enough patch of habitat for a breeding population right in the middle of the city – but if we get them in the Port Hills, they will visit, especially in winter." Like all songbirds, the tui's voice box is lower down than a human's, and the air tube into the lungs is split, so it can control two sounds simultaneously. In captivity, tui will mimic humans. In the wild, it's their clear, bell-like notes – swallowed at the end by a distinctive squawk – that add to their charm.

Molles postulates that squawk might be what tui use to distinguish themselves as individuals. "That sound might be really beautiful to a tui!"

In the heart of Akaroa, best known as the place the French almost colonised, tui spotters use binoculars to distinguish their birds.

They call themselves the "corner group", for the trees on the corner of their street where tui have been sighted. They are mostly retired locals who have, by their own admission, become twitchers.

"We have been seen out in the rain, shading our binoculars, trying to read the bird's bands," says Robyn Grigg.

A dinner guest was, famously, left alone with her vegetable pie, when her hosts had to rush out to track a tui. A nine-year-old, visiting her grandparents, refused to eat unless she could sit facing the window where tui might be spotted.

From the original April release, the group has, so far, identified Manu, Coco, Fern and The Vicar. The latter, "has been seen with a mate ... which has caused a few bawdy jokes, but we won't go there".

Friends think they're mad – in a nice way. "We're now living in my in-laws' garden, and my mother-in-law used to feed the tui. Now they've come back."

In 1849, a 21-year-old Frenchman called Francois Narbey jumped ship in Akaroa, fled into the coastal bush and spent three months surviving on shellfish. He bought his first piece of land on Banks Peninsula in 1857 and began producing milk and cheese. Eventually, he would own 4000 hectares from his home base at Long Bay.

The tui restoration project's first fledglings were spotted in Francois's great-grandson's garden.

Brian Narbey is out tending beehives the day the Star-Times calls. His wife, Faye, recounts the tale of the tui fighting off the stoat, and the eventual discovery of the chicks she called Santa and Noelle. The Narbeys fed the birds up on sugar syrup, Farex baby food (for the iron), bananas and pears, and watched as their white tufts appeared, and their mum, Scion, went on to lay two more sets of eggs. A trio dubbed the Three Musketeers have been brought down to the feeder. They're waiting for the next arrivals.

In the mornings, says Faye, "it's like a bloody mad frenzy. There's juveniles racing everywhere".

Tui at dawn. Ruru at night. Must be nice? "It's all right for you to say! You ought to have heard the morepork last night. Bloody thing. Why must it start at 4 o'clock in the morning?!"

For more information or to support the restoration project: www.bpct.org.nz. Chatham Island tui, an endemic subspecies, have also recently been successfully translocated between islands. The Banks Peninsula project is the first involving a mainland site.

Tui tucker

Nectar-bearing plants will encourage tui to your garden.

The tui's "top seven":

Kowhai

Mountain flax – wharariki

NZ Flax – harakeke

Cabbage tree – ti-kouka

Mountain five finger

NZ ngaio

Tree fuchsia – kotukutuku -

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