Steve Braunias is an award-winning New Zealand journalist, author, columnist and editor.
OPINION
“When I get older losing my hair.” So I reached the age of that awful Paul McCartney song last week. Ugh. The only way to avoid the ignominy was to die at 63. I wouldn’thave minded. Anything instead of having your life roped to that whimsical noodling track from Sgt Pepper – the worst song on their worst album, courtesy of the master of whimsy and noodle. “Those freaks was right when they said you was dead,” Lennon sang of his Beatle other. I clung to those lyrics, that song (How Do You Sleep from Imagine), as I spent my birthday morning at the beach.
“When I’m 64.” An old man in a cold month, in overcoat and a pair of pants pulled over my pyjamas – the elderly are saved from vanity, our only dress code is to get dressed. It was Thursday. Kids were at school and the middle-aged were greasing the wheels of industry or performing whatever other metaphor for capitalism. I have never worked a birthday in my life and I wasn’t about to break the bad habit of a lifetime. To be a sloth, or not to be; there’s no question about it. Sloth, every June 20.
“I could be handy, mending a fuse.” The tide was high and on the retreat. I love the bays and creeks of estuarine Auckland, filled and emptied, rushing in and shuffling out, like a fridge door that opens and closes – right now it was open, and I saw a strange shape feeding at the water’s edge. Strange, as in it was like a beautiful miracle, a birthday surprise, because in all my years at the beach, I had never seen a royal spoonbill.
A Royal Spoonbill (kotoku ngutupapa) at the Manawatu River estuary. Photo / Imogen Warren.
“When I’m 64.” It was just the one solitary spoonbill, a large, gorgeous creature, white as paper, its black spoonbill swishing from side to side in the shallow water, likely picking out little crabs. It’s a thrilling sight at any time.
The great ornithologist Major Robert Wilson – war hero, breeder of lilies and rhododendrons, author of the classic Bird Islands of New Zealand (1959) – caught sight of them in 1957, when they were rare and newly introduced, and writes with excitement in the pages of birdwatching bible Notornis, “The establishment of a new species in any country is an interesting study. When the bird is as large and striking as the Royal Spoonbill (Platalea regia) it is doubly so.
With the breeding of three pairs last season near Okarito, and return in May 1956 to the estuary of the Manawatu River of 12 birds, it may be considered that the Royal Spoonbill can be struck from the list of stragglers in New Zealand and promoted to the status of a resident species.” The resident at my local beach looked right at home.
“Doing the garden, digging the weeds.” Another solitary bird arrived: a red-billed seagull. It dropped out of the sky and floated on the water like a bottle. It looked out to sea. It kept its head high, had no interest in food; it was just there to relax, to enjoy the winter’s morning. Maybe it was celebrating its birthday.
“When I’m 64.” And then a third solitary bird arrived: a white-faced heron. These are likely my favourite bird in New Zealand, a thing of grace and elegance, always easy to spot in a mangrove swamp – keep looking, and you’ll see a flash of white in a sea of grey-green, as it turns its face towards you from its roost.
So lovely to behold, and yet it’s in possession of one of the harshest, most raucous calls in birdland – a rock ’n’ roll voice, like John Lennon calling out Paul McCartney as a dimwit (“The one mistake you made was in your head”) in the only good song on Imagine.
“Send me a postcard, drop me a line.” I stood on the shore, happily birdwatching, a harmless old coot with his Thermos of instant coffee, when two police constables suddenly arrived on the scene. “How long have you been here,” asked one of them, picking his way over wet rocks. I said, “64 years.” He said, “?” I explained the circumstances of the age that matched the awful Paul McCartney song. “Yeah, happy birthday,” he said, “but have you seen a naked man?” I said, “?” He explained that police had received a complaint about a naked man at the beach. He was described as young. “So not you,” said the officer, “obviously.”
“When I’m 64.” Solitary royal spoonbill, red-billed gull by itself, just the one white-faced heron, a single cold nudist – and a fully, warmly dressed man alone on an Auckland shore, getting on, getting there, making his debut at 64.
