Steve Braunias: on being a featherhead

Kotare, the sacred kingfisher. Photo / JOHN REID

Steve Braunias on the definition of happiness.

To watch a bird, closely and patiently, observing its size, its colouring, its behaviour, is a very particular and exact form of happiness. It does you good. It doesn't do the bird any good but you can't have everything. It gets you outside. It concentrates the mind; it fills it with feathers, gives it flight.

To watch a bird is to make a scientific or poetic communion not just with the bird but with everyone who has ever watched a bird. Sometimes when I'm watching a bird I'm thinking of some of the greatest birdwatchers in New Zealand ornithology – people such as Geoff Moon, author of really wonderful books of bird photography; and Graham Turbott, a former director of the Auckland Museum. Moon filled a pond with fish at his home in Titirangi and took time-lapse photos of kingfishers snatching their prey; Turbott was despatched to the subantarctic islands during World War II to keep an eye on potential naval threats to New Zealand but there was no threat and as such, nothing to see, so he got in a lot of very good birdwatching. I met them in their final years. They still had such sharp eyesight.

To watch a bird is also to listen. There is a shocking story about the mynah's voice in the June 1962 issue of New Zealand bird journal, Notornis. A correspondent writes of milking cows on Tiri Tiri island one morning: "I heard a bird singing and calling on the watch-tower. I took this to be a starling but, on getting up there to have a look, I saw that it was a mynah. The bird moved along the roof, stopped and looked into the spouting, at the same time calling like a starling ... Suddenly it disappeared into the spouting. Then its head appeared and it was seen to drop a small object. This happened three times ... I went over and found three young starlings a few days old, all dead." God almighty. Lured to their death by a talented mimic.

To watch a bird is to watch for death. New Zealand birders meet on west coast beaches at this time of year to conduct beach patrols: they look for dead seabirds, washed up on the shore in winter storms. There are some pretty rare and exciting finds to be had – birds from faraway lands, blown off-course, separated, lost, doomed. Their corpses litter our Tasman coast. This, too, brings happiness.

To watch a bird on Christmas Day is acceptable. Notornis, March 1961: "On the night of 25/12/1960, as I was walking down the footpath below the lighthouse on The Brothers, I heard a petrel chick crying. I had a torch with me and I soon discovered the tail of a tuatara protruding from the burrow from which the sound was coming. The tail disappeared and the tuatara came out with the small chick of a fairy prion in its mouth. The chick was held by the tail and was crying loudly. The tuatara stopped and watched me for a short while before making a dash for the taupata scrub about a yard away. As it reached the scrub I seized it by the tail and pulled it out. It still held on to the chick until I squeezed it by the neck." The story merits a footnote from the Notornis editor: "It has often been suspected that tuataras may maim and devour small petrel chicks. This seems to be the first eye-witness of an actual assault." No; in the next issue, June 1961, a reader from Nelson writes: "The footnote will stand amendment, for in 1885 Andreas Reischeck and Professor Thomas recorded this bird-eating habit of tuataras on Karewa Island in the Bay of Plenty." Again, communion with great bird watchers of times past; again, death.

To watch a bird in a location where there is no previous record of it is that special and intense genre known as twitching. Stragglers, vagrants from another land, like the amazing Franklin's gull that I twitched in 2009, in Bruce Pullman Park, Papakura; it migrates from North America to South America but one bird lost its way, ending up alone, a genuine rara avis, on a barren and muddy sports field in New Zealand. News of its sensational arrival spread fast. I went to twitch it with Jeremy Wells. It was white with grey wings and the tip of its bill was red. It was a small bird, beautiful and doomed. "Aw yeah," said Wells. He doesn't give much away. But I could tell he was happy.

Next week: Siena Yates