No New Zealander leaves the country for any length of time without knowing they’ll miss their soaps.
This is not to refer to Shortland Street, which seems to screen the world over anyway, or any of the television serials, but the outside goings-on of our wildlife.
Flocks of tūī are always broadcasting one another’s business – comprehensively, given they’ve got two voice boxes each – in concert with branch-bending kererū, paranoid tauhou (wax-eyes) determined to remain mysterious and – if you go bush and are very lucky – the lolloping escort services of fantails.
On the other side of the world, the consolation for missing all this is that the live soap opera goes on all night. Sure, ruru can hoot up a storm, but only in bright moonlight can you actually see one.
Here, Fox News starts after dusk in this busy corner-section garden – well lit by sodium lights and traffic – and it’s like Piccadilly Circus. Foxes are so twitchy and anxious as to make tauhou seem lackadaisical, so their intrepidity is the more remarkable. Omnivores, they like to dine on the huge, fat garden slugs. A vixen usually turns up first at an elegant trot, whisking to and fro to check for enemies and edibles; then her teenaged cubs bowl in and goof about, followed by a bumptious dog fox, to whom she sometimes gives a blood-curdling dressing-down. Then it’s all in: foxes of all ages and sizes streak in and out, springing over fences and threading through hedges, catching up on one another’s business via scent and seeing what’s on the menu in the great restaurant of human-food wastage.
Times writer Giles Coren reports that in London, at times heaving this summer with uncollected bags, the council has effectively outsourced its rubbish distribution to the efficiency of foxes, who in turn sub it out to the gulls. Hygiene infrastructure is not this basic in Dublin, but an Irish fox always stands ready to address itself to a bin, and the seabirds are right onto it. The closer you are to the coast, the less likely it is that any food you drop will hit the ground.
Loss of habitat and abundant food waste have made the protected birds a hazard to humans in some areas. As the locals put it, “They’ve become very bold.” Disputes have arisen over whether food was dropped, or whether a gull had simply pre-empted its precipitation. But hey, waste not, want not.
This is also the local magpies’ ethos, their having come to terms with this household’s older dog about biddy-biddies in his fur. They perch on his back and nip out the seeds. The dog is of an age to be philosophical about this, as he never was about being teased by kererū and kākā.
The magpies, however, have their nemesis in squirreldom.Any grey streak of fluff who comes to raid the bird feeder often has a gang of magpies trying in vain to chase it off. Greys, having heavily supplanted the native reds, are regarded as the spivs of this community.
As to who runs the show, that’d be the strapping hooded crows, who might be made of dark metal. They fear no one and size up everything. They have tremendous presence, and should be on a retainer for their menacing contribution to film and TV soundtracks.
Alas, no badgers have been ready for their close-up yet, though there are setts in city wilderness areas. They’re so vulnerable to homicidal farmers and illegal fighting rings that – magnificently – no one will tell anyone where to find them. Not even the spivvy squirrels.
It’s not New Zealand, but Beatrix Potter with a secret underground is a pretty good show meantime.
