Song of the Birds: The history and meaning of New Zealand’s native birds
By Robert Vennell
HarperCollins
Reviewed by David Barnes
Let’s face it — there are a lot of books about New Zealand birds.
This one is a great addition to that pantheon.
It does not attempt to be comprehensive, featuring only 34 species, several of which are extinct.
These are grouped, much like this year’s Bird of the Year competition, into categories such as songsters and hunters.
The author, Robert Vennell, is a natural science curator at Auckland Museum/Tāmaki Paenga Hira, whose three previous books have covered New Zealand plants, sea creatures, and “lost plants” and fungi.
He sets the scene with a 21-page introduction that is subtitled “a brief history of New Zealand’s birds and people”.
He goes into the way that each wave of human activity — from early Māori hunting and fires to European agriculture and fires, with hunting for collections or fashion — impacted on the health of our bird populations.
Of course, the introduction of mammalian predators, deliberate or otherwise, as well as other animals that affect forest health, such as deer, had a major effect.
As conservation advocate Nicola Toki often says, “anything with four legs, fur and teeth” has not been good for our birds.
However, the essay does conclude on a brighter note as it discusses the increasing conservation efforts of the last few decades.
Each chapter starts by looking at its chosen bird in a te ao Māori context.
This involves three aspects.
Firstly, it describes the birds’ place in Māori mythology.
Then it looks at them as a resource, for example as food or a source of prized feathers (or both) or as pets.
Details of how birds were tracked, caught and cooked are included.
Their inclusion in whakataukī (proverbs) also gets a mention.
Early Pākehā interactions with the birds are then described.
This includes quotes from a remarkable range of sources.
Sources range from Captain Cook’s voyages (and not just the usual suspects, Cook himself, Banks and the Forsters) to surveyors, settlers, poets and even the Auckland Island shipwreck survivors from the Grafton.
The book then goes on to describe how each bird lives in the modern environment, including conservation efforts.
Of course, for the extinct species (moa, koreke, whēkau/laughing owl and huia), that aspect is replaced by a description of the events that led to their demise.
Sidebars on taxonomy and etymology are included in each chapter, with the latter including Latin, English and Māori names.
In many cases, less common alternative names are included.
The illustrations are a real highlight here.
Each chapter is introduced with a full-page 19th Century painting, mostly by John Keulemans, one of the main illustrators for Sir Walter Lawry Buller’s seminal A History of the Birds of New Zealand.
These are quite remarkable and are close to photographic quality in the details they illustrate.
The majority of the photographs are by Matthew Cattin, a friend of the author.
These are of uniformly high quality.
I would imagine that it would have taken a lot of effort to amass such a portfolio.
I was particularly impressed by a shot of a bittern/matuku-hūrepo, which is both rare and difficult to spot, with a freshly caught eel in its beak.
David Barnes lives in Lower Hutt and is an avid tramper and an armchair mountaineer.