The Owl That Fell from the Sky (8 page)

A long-remembered ovenbird nest

One day I received a telephone enquiry about a bird's nest that had been in a family's possession for many years after a forebear collected it in South America. It was said to have been later presented to Auckland Museum. After the telephone call I was pleased to find the nest listed in the catalogue system and the object itself in the storeroom. The nest was accompanied by a section of the branch on which it had been built; there was also a stuffed ovenbird perched on the nest and another on the branch.

The elderly caller made an appointment to view the nest. When I took him into the storeroom and opened a cupboard to reveal it, he burst into tears. The sight evoked old memories: he had known the nest during his childhood some seventy years before.

Ovenbirds get their name because some species build large enclosed nests out of mud and the finished result looks like a clay oven. The thick-walled nest is reinforced with straw, hair and other fibres, and the eggs are laid deep inside on a bed of soft dried grass. The museum nest, and the two birds mounted with it, were of the species red ovenbird or rufous hornero—
Furnarius rufus
—a brown thrush-sized bird that is the national bird of Argentina. Red ovenbirds live in fairly open areas, often close to human habitation, and place their nests in conspicuous positions, such as on bare forked branches or the tops of posts.

In any sizable city it is never long before somebody with a historical, cultural or scientific question thinks to ring the museum, or visit it in hope of seeing an expert in person. Queries about animals flow in from all quarters, from academics and tertiary students, school pupils, people with a burning interest in nature, and specialists in the commercial sector, from book publishers in Australia to documentary researchers in Britain. I once received a telephone call from a family in Ohio whose daughter was doing a school project on New Zealand birds.

The enquiries vary greatly. In my department, we receive questions about birds and their life history, about the museum's birds on display or in storage, and about ornithology and ornithological organisations. One day someone rang me urgently from Wellington to ask if kiwi mate for life; he was a speechwriter for a company boss who was delivering a speech in eight minutes' time. I was able to tell him it seems they probably do. A city council arborist asked about the breeding season of herons in order to schedule the felling of tall trees at a safe time, and people cutting suburban hedges ring with the same issue with regard to the nesting of small garden birds.

One caller had seen fast-moving flies in the plumage of his pet parrot, and I was able to tell him about louse, or hippoboscid, flies. These quite large flat parasitic insects are sometimes seen when you handle wild birds, and the speed of their movements is amazing. I thought I was seeing things the first time a hippoboscid landed on my hand and then returned in a flash to conceal itself in the plumage of the bird I was holding for banding.

Most curators are highly accessible and may in effect be on standby all day to deal with public enquiries. When I started at Auckland Museum in 1982 there was an archaic but delightfully simple paging system. The offices in the administrative section of the museum looked out across a large internal courtyard to a high blank wall, which was the back of the public galleries. High on the wall was a large flat circular light that flashed a short morse code repeatedly in dull crimson when activated by the receptionist. (My own call-sign was short–long–short–short–short.) If you were away from your telephone, you looked periodically through any convenient window to see if the light was flashing. In some corridors there was also a warning sound to indicate that paging was in progress. Today there are many more landlines in the building, not to mention mobile phones.

 

 

Perhaps the most common question I receive is along the lines of “What bird have I just seen (or heard)?” This is often easily sorted from the person's description of the bird's size, shape and colour. Bird calls are much less easily resolved from phone descriptions—even when the enquirer, in desperation, says such inventive things as that the sound reminds him or her of a phrase in the third movement of the Bruch violin concerto. Callers have sometimes played me barely audible recordings of a mystery songster, or taken a cordless telephone into the garden to be closer to a bird calling in the background.

Over the decades many enquiries have concerned welcome swallows (
Hirundo neoxena
), spur-winged plovers (
Vanellus miles
) and spotted doves (
Streptopelia chinensis
). The swallow and plover arrived of their own accord from Australia and in the last fifty years have spread throughout New Zealand. The enquiries have come from people who, for the first time, have seen these birds closely, found them breeding, or heard them calling. The welcome swallow, which flits about at great speed with its pointed wings and deeply forked tail, is easily identified by most people, but less so the first sight of its mud nest plastered to the side of a garage or shed. When these birds first arrived they tended to nest in the most inaccessible places—under tall bridges, for example—but as their numbers built up they were forced to nest closer to human habitation. They are now one of the commonest small birds in the country.

Spur-winged plovers arrived in the 1930s and began breeding in the far south of the South Island. They gradually spread, and were first seen breeding in the south of the North Island in the early 1970s. My early years at Auckland Museum coincided with the proliferation of these birds in the Auckland region. Large plovers, they have a brown back, white underparts and a black and white head. The adults have a big spur at the bend on the leading edge of their folded wing (actually the “wrist”). They also sport a fleshy yellow facial patch with pendulous wattles; this leads to their alternative name the masked lapwing, because they look like a dandy at a masked ball. Spur-winged plovers fly slowly but with urgent, clipped wing-beats. With their loud penetrating call, which has been called a staccato rattle, and their fondness for paddocks and grassy fields, they soon attract attention.

The spotted dove is an escaped cage-bird of south-east Asian origin that has been breeding in low numbers around Auckland since the 1920s. Recently, for unknown reasons, it has become much more common, and more likely to be noticed by residents in the greater Auckland area. Spotted doves are smaller than city pigeons, and predominantly brown with grey and pinkish tones. Adults have a black band finely spotted with white on the back of the neck. They have a distinctive and often persistent cooing call.

In summer, when the tall New Zealand flax is in flower, common starlings that feed on the nectar often get orange-red pollen smeared on their foreheads. This is usually the explanation when people ring with questions about birds with orange heads. At one time it was popular to build wooden nest-boxes for the garden and people often asked what diameter the entrance hole should be to admit common starlings but exclude common mynas. (The answer is not more than forty-five millimetres.)

Another common enquiry is about mystery bones discovered at a beach, on a farm, under a house, or in a cave, swamp or sand dune. Usually the bones need to be brought to the museum for direct examination, and we compare them with reference specimens in the collection. Increasingly, however, an emailed digital photograph will do the job, or at least narrow down the possibilities. With large bones there is always the chance they may be of moa, New Zealand's extinct wingless birds. Occasionally they are. Other bones brought in and added to our collection have belonged to similarly extinct birds such as the North Island adzebill, the North Island goose and the New Zealand coot.

In even rarer instances, an enquirer will bring in human bones eroded out of prehistoric Māori burial sites. Most often, though, a mysterious bone is from a domestic animal such as a sheep or cow; we have an articulated cow skeleton in the land vertebrates storeroom, useful for pointing out which bone has been found.

I always thank people for bringing in bones, whatever they turn out to be, because it is important to check them. Once I drove forty kilometres to a harbour headland to find that bones a farmer had uncovered in a pit were horse bones. Similarly, “dinosaur” bones in a south Auckland garden proved to be whale bones.

Another regular enquiry is about bird bands. Each metal band, or ring, a biologist places on the leg of a bird has a unique number that identifies the bird individually. The New Zealand National Banding Scheme for wild birds is run by the Department of Conservation, but used to be run by the museum in Wellington. Older bands say “SEND DOMINION MUSEUM NEW ZEALAND” or a variation of this, and other bands may have “NATIONAL MUSEUM” in the inscription. Dominion Museum became the National Museum of New Zealand, and then the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, often contracted to “Te Papa”. It is surprising how many senders wrongly add Auckland to the address on the bird band, and how many postal workers think the national museum is in Auckland. The result is a constant trickle of bands, or reports of bands, which we redirect to the banding office in Wellington.

Other jurisdictions have also had trouble with inscriptions on bird bands. In the United States, bands at one time read “WASHINGTON BIOLOGICAL SURVEY”, abbreviated on smaller bands to “WASH. BIOL. SURV.” There is an apocryphal tale about an Arkansas farmer who wrote in to complain that, after he shot a banded crow, his wife followed the cooking instructions helpfully provided on the bird's leg but the bird tasted horrible.

Recovering and reporting bands from dead birds provides data vital to establishing movements and minimum ages of individual birds. In 1997 a common tern,
Sterna hirundo
, that had been banded in Finland was caught (and released again) on the Victorian coast of Australia after a journey, probably via South Africa, of over 26,000 kilometres, the longest documented journey of any bird. In New Zealand, the centralised national banding scheme began in 1950 and the millionth bird was banded in 1987. There have been over 400,000 recaptures or recoveries of banded birds, including a gannet,
Morus serrator
, that had travelled over 5,000 kilometres from Cape Kidnappers in the North Island to Western Australia, and a house sparrow,
Passer domesticus
, that had moved over 300 kilometres from Upper Hutt, north of Wellington, to Reparoa, midway between Taupo and Rotorua. A royal albatross nicknamed Grandma bred regularly at Taiaroa Head near Dunedin and the banding of this bird from 1937 established that it lived over sixty years.

The banding office replies to every sender of a band, telling them where, when and at what age the bird was banded, and what the discovery shows. Unfortunately, many senders do not think to open and flatten the band—which is not easy to do anyway with the larger stainless steel bands
—and
instead post it in its circular state. I have received a few empty envelopes where the curled band has burst out during transit and been lost, along with its number. It is always advisable to note the band's number in the accompanying letter. In most cases it is in fact enough just to report the number and keep the band.

 

 

Some enquiries we receive are trivial. People in a pub may be trying to settle an argument about the size of an animal. Others may want help to solve a crossword puzzle clue. Some callers seem unable to end their conversations. They move on beyond the original issue to other birds they have seen in their gardens, and perhaps, if you are not careful, to all the interesting birds they have ever seen on holidays at home and abroad.

Not everyone accepts a curator's advice. A man brought in what he believed was a fossilised bird's head. When I told him that in my opinion it was just a rock
—al
though unquestionably a very interesting rock—he went into denial. “But look, you can see the eyes,” he insisted.