Geo News
What sorts of birds are you likely to see if you tackle Te Araroa? After walking, as they say, “every f***ing inch” of the famous trail’s 3200 kilometres, methodically counting birds all the way, conservationist Colin Miskelly can tell you that mostly, there will be sparrows. The chirpy imports topped his tally at 12,500, more than double the second-most abundant, chaffinches.
Other exotics were plentiful along the trail, too: blackbirds, mynahs, starlings and goldfinches all flocked into the top 10.
Miskelly, curator of vertebrates at Te Papa, tackled Te Araroa with his brother the summer before last. Along the way he’d left stashes of counting paraphernalia: pencils, waterproof notebooks, and A3 graph paper. He posted his notes home as he went. All up, he worked out, it was about 24 square metres of paper, “enough to wallpaper a small room”.
His GPS-enabled watch buzzed as each kilometre ticked past and at every second buzz, Miskelly jotted down the species he’d seen. After each day’s walk he would stay up late, feeding the data into citizen science project the New Zealand Bird Atlas (see ‘The Great Bird Nerds’, Issue 179), and knocking it into blog posts for Te Papa, and eventually, a paper for the journal Notornis. He’d be up early in the mornings, too, keeping an ear out for ruru, and diligently noting them down.
Physically, after a lifetime of tramping, he found the trail “a doddle”. But when he reached the South Island forests he was dismayed by the quiet. It had been 30 or 40 years since he’d walked some of these trails. He especially missed the kākāriki.
“It’s just part of that insidious ongoing decline that you don’t really notice year on year,” he says. “But after a gap of several decades, you just realise, ‘Oh, shit, things are going backwards here.”
Sometimes, he knew, even birds that seemed to be thriving were in trouble. He saw plenty of tarāpunga, or red-billed gulls, for example—they came in third on his list—because the trail passed by the country’s mainland colonies. But Miskelly points out that two massive colonies offshore have collapsed due to lack of food. (The Kaikōura gulls are in trouble, too—see Issue 187.)
Did he get sick of sparrows? Only on one day, he says—trudging through 10 kilometres of light industrial land in South Auckland. “It was more than 1000 sparrows in a day.” He went into the project determined to keep his blog positive, but his post for that section uses the phrase “ornithological tedium”.
Miskelly’s now midway through a new mission: continuing the bird count on every track and old forestry route in the Tararua Forest Park. All up it’s about 600 or 700 kilometres, he reckons, and he’s walking it one long weekend at a time. “It’ll keep me out of the house for a bit longer,” he says.
