Manu whakapapa – Teoti Jardine
The moorings – Annabel Wilson
The call – Rob Walton
Requiem for two fine specimens donated by Sir Walter Lawry Buller to the colonial museum – Margaret Moores
Washing dishes – Lisa Wiley
Caged – Christine Cloughley
Polish bantams & broken hearts – James Claffey
All books are picture books if they’re done right – Hayden Pyke
Early end to gala dinner – Ann Palmer
The trill of the pyds – Mark Kirkbride
Poporo tū ki te hamuti – Ben Prisk
Feather by feather – Allen Ashley
Parson bird, 1866 – Liana Ashenden
Bird restaurant – Lesley Wallis
Ghosts of the forest – Kathi Crawford
Caging – Jenny Elliott
Tūī – Sherryl Clark
Phoenix – Gillian O’Shaughnessy
Restless – June Pitman-Hayes
Nesting – Sara Crane
Broken wings – Sandy Feinstein
Between here and there – Charlotte Hamrick
Mrs Hobbs and the tūī – Trish Gribben
Sunday rituals – Amanda Hurley
November, 1963 – Marybeth Rua-Larsen
At least seven states of being Jolly – Janean Cherkun
Moulting – Kai Holmwood
Dream girl – Faith Allington
Life list – Beth Sherman
Who has seen the nest of the kuaka? – Heather McQuillan
Bluebird – Alice Kinerk
The ravens of Stonehenge – Ryan Padraic
This passing world – Alex Reece Abbott
Doves – Laila Miller
Robin – John Paul Caponigro
Silence – Marty Beauchamp
Features
Kōrero: Vaughan Rapatahana with Ben Brown
Celebrating Mansfield 2023: Redmer Yska’s new book
Celebrating Mansfield 2023: Phantom Billstickers series
Interview: Nod Ghosh & settlers, separation, snakes and ghosts — two novellas
Book feature: Pav Deconstructed
Flash around Aotearoa: Waikato
Flash around Aotearoa: Queenstown Lakes
Featured Artwork
Liana Ashenden – Watercolour sketch of female huia skull
Janis Butler Holm – Scary birdy
Rata Ingrram – Kea
David Howard – The perpetual bird
Desiree Jung – Eagle stand
Anna Nazarova-Evans – Sirin
Kerry Lander – He manu e rere ana
Keith Nunes – Ducky
Mike Perusse – The bird show
Rata Ingrram – Korimako one-noter
Annabel Wilson – Nest found in the corner of the chapel on Kamau Taurua
Desiree Jung – Yellow link
Mike Perusse – The bird show, face to face
Liana Ashenden – Watcher
Mike Perusse – The bird show, autumn in Massachusetts
Sheila Brown – Wonderous flight
Liana Ashenden, Watercolour sketch of female huia skull
Manu whakapapa
Teoti Jardine
Within your Hedge Sparrow / Dunnock ahua, as you dart from branch to
twig to lawn, I see your reptilian Tūpuna on display.
Skills you learned so well avoiding the teeth and feet of dinosaurs.
Your forelegs grew feathers, gave you flight.
Now, from cats not dinosaurs
you safely fly.
The moorings
Annabel Wilson
a heritage home designed by architect John Sydney Swan, built in 1905 and an emblem of defiance against the 1960s encroachment of the motorway on the Thorndon landscape.
the ropes, chains, anchors by which a boat or ship is moored.
You’re reading the Dictionary of the Occult and Einstein’s biography, under the clothesline in your sunhat. The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Newly built brick steps lead up from the Lilburn gate. It’s Thursday. We couldn’t wait –
After dinner over red wine in coffee mugs, we measure distances in the gathering dusk with a Leica laser. From that tree to the workshop, to the fence, to the edge of the lawn, the windowsill, the threshold, a straight red beam cutting through space and darkness, calculating the incalculable va between here and there. We watch
kaka swoop
down
to hang out
in the pōhutukawa
There’s talk of the old masters – Douglas and Rita, KM’s message on Tinakori Road: If I began asking you questions about Wellington ways there would be no end to it. A naked light-bulb flickers – old wiring, never fixed – as we drift into the arms of Morpheus. I have nightmares about running and running, some kind of conspiracy, living in a country where people aren’t free, we are being watched
Knowledge is limited.
In the morning your eyes are etched red. You also saw something in your sleep. Upon waking I know that the good people won. The light has stopped flickering. The kaka keep swooping –
Imagination encircles the world.
The call
Rob Walton
John says he’ll teach me the names of all the birds I’m likely to see here, but this place is sour in the week and curdled by the weekend, so there aren’t many and I disbelieve those he offers: grey scabtail, bog petrel, dirtback and Hades warbler. He rubs his leg through dirty combat pants, and says this last one flies between the islands and hovers above rotting tree stumps. I don’t know how to respond. Is he making a point?
He tells me about markings on wings, tails, beaks and faces. Length of neck and legs and bills. Tufts.
Then he tries to imitate the mating calls and general chat. He lifts up one long leg and moves the heel of his boot against his knee. It’s not the best way to itch a scratch, but his hands are cupped to his mouth, calling mythical birds of land and sea and air.
I tell him I understand the call of the wild and the silence of the domesticated. I tell him I get it and say I’m hungry now. He tries to make a joke about eggs and bird seed. I say I’m done with the birds. The only one I can think of is the rough-legged buzzard that perched on the gate post before John tried to take dad’s place. Its call tries to get inside my head. I cover my ears.
Janis Butler Holm, Scary Birdy
Requiem for two fine specimens donated by Sir Walter Lawry Buller to the Colonial Museum
Margaret Moores
(after Bill Hammond, Watching for Buller 2)
The females of the chorus adjust their gowns – arrange silk, patterned with fern leaves and feathers, across their breasts. The males straighten sleeves along arms, preen their tufts. They rise from their seats accompanied by the metallic clatter of symbolic skinning knives loose in pockets and glass eyes mounted on wire and strung around necks. The stones are damp beneath their feet.
Facing the ocean, they vibrate air into syrinxes and rehearse scales and warm-up pieces. One by one, they correct their stance: knees loose, one foot slightly forward, shoulders low and back.
The performance begins with ancient lullabies for nestlings – songs of waves breaking against rocks, gravel shifting beneath feet and the wind’s breath over salt water.
Next, a suite of laments for the pretty cabinet specimens of the past – an overture of keels scraping against shingle, followed by alarms. A refrain of syncopated heavy shot and single shot, a three-foot stick as counterpoint. Rising tone to both barrels. Killed. Skinned. Stuffed. Staccato.
The hems of their garments bleed crimson and emerald on contact with water and dye from the fern leaves drips and pools at their feet. Wind-borne sea spray fresh from Antarctica inspires an interlude of vocal improvisations celebrating flight.
Coda: (con dolore) Hand nets, taxidermy, arsenical soap, skeletons, labels, museum beetles, Keulemans’ lithographs – their disembodied skins becoming bird again in line and colour.
Washing dishes
Lisa Wiley
Every spring the same bright cardinal taunts my orange cat trapped behind the sliding glass door. First blaze of color after a demanding winter. His mate waits next door in their sugar maple nest. Red, always your favorite color – Chinese friends give scarlet envelopes on New Year’s, promise of good fortune. Reporters wearing red ties to press conferences are selected more often by the President. The maraschino cherry on top of the decadent sundae. Your first car cost extra, just had to be red, even though police pull you over more often than if you chose charcoal. I hear the bird’s shrill whistle through the glass. Red as the ladybugs dotting the windowpane when it gets warmer. Red as the flashy firetruck rushing to douse the fire that I can’t shrug off. Red as the blood running down my ring finger cut on my favorite mug scooping slippery shards hidden by suds. Poor cat, this bird’s song is pretty bold; April snow doesn’t deter him or keep national news trucks away. Power lines intact, the honey locust waits to unfurl – no need to start the generator. You probably don’t have one in your garage. Safe, warm, I stand here washing dishes, female cardinals more demure.
Caged
Christine Cloughley
There’s a woman talking quietly to a man behind a screen that’s meant to give privacy, but is just a thin length of curtain hanging on a circular rail. An emperor’s new clothes of hospital design. The whispers of the woman spill over and around and through and under this wall that isn’t there.
The man is young, insubstantial. When blood tests are needed there’s nowhere left to take it from his skeletal arms. He’s bony and bird-like with a sparrow’s fragile chest in which you can imagine his heart flutters through eggshell-thin skin.
He comes for chemotherapy that won’t cure him. Lies down, eyes shut, headphones on, saying fuck the world without talking. There’s no song of joy from this birdman who’s dying.
The same nurse who jokes with you and tells you funny stories about her weekend pub crawl now sits with the man behind the screen, gentling him with words that build a soft nest of sound for him to comfort into.
You can hear her soothing murmur through the thin curtain and you can sense that, despite her solace, this birdman would do almost anything to fly.
Rata Ingram, Kea, acrylic on canvas
Polish bantams & broken hearts
James Claffey
There are Polish bantams on the ground, hunting for bits of grain, bread, lettuce, whatever spilled garbage they can discover in the yard. The door to the outdoor toilet hangs off its hinges, one screw keeping it from flattening a passing hen. From the bar the strains of an out-of-tune guitar, the rain batters the tune into submission. The man leans into the wooden-walled shed, cobwebs thick-hanging from the beams, the dark wooden toilet seat wet from misdirected efforts. He lifts the door and pulls it toward him, the handle slippery from rain, the wooden boards splintered and rotting. The single lightbulb that hangs from the socket is dead, the only bright spot, the last glimmer of clouded sun. He wipes the wet seat with a torn sleeve and lowers himself onto the cold wood. Sitting there, head in his hands, he imagined the time before she left him, the long evening walks along the Shannon, the swans in moonbeam, the trees darkening as he held her hand warm in his and strolled in mutual silence. A passing bantam, its white-crested head looking more like a mop than a hen, pecks at the damp earth. Rough fingers ruffle the afro-like feathers and a soft rain falls.
All books are picture books if they’re done right
Hayden Pyke
No one buys books in the bookstore, not really. So, there isn’t much to do if things are tidy and the newspapers are out. Marrisa and I tend to hang out downstairs in the storeroom talking about writing and listening for the door buzzer.
Marrissa told me she has this story she’s been trying to write for forever about when her skull cracked.
It’s all movement she says, because the event itself was lightning. She’s on a horse and then she’s not on a horse and then a hoof comes down on her face, and every part of her future twists like a cat avoiding a bath. But that’s not the story she said. The story is in the moments she is not on the horse and not on the ground. It has something to do with being mid-air.
I’ve bungy jumped, I know about falling, but I don’t think that’s what she means. I’ve also stood at the top of a stairway and thought about throwing myself down. That might be closer.
We sat on the floor, our knees nearly touching, and she explained that in the air, she felt like she was being held. She remembers feeling buoyant, like she had wings. She’s obsessed over that feeling ever since. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever write the story now. The headaches are getting worse. But when the shop is quiet and the pills are working, she draws pictures of horses and pictures of birds.
Early end to gala dinner
Ann Palmer
One hundred and eighty-three birders in gala plumage.
Cosmopolitan high flyers flock at this year’s gala dinner for the Ornithological Society of New Zealand. There’s a strict No Carry rule. Check in binoculars and cameras at security before entering the grand foyer for drinks.
Nevertheless, a female in a glittering, red strapless dress has a matching eight-setting metallic red Olympus TG6 tucked into her G cup bra. That suspiciously large paunch under a male’s dress jacket is a GoPro Hero11.
The 184th member was late. Robin checked in her binoculars and Sony Alpha 6700 Mirrorless, and followed the red carpet to the chirps, chatters and occasional alarm calls. Easing herself through a thicket of legs ending in high heels or Hugo Boss, and hands ending in wineglasses and programmes, she looked around for Jay.
Oh there he is. They’re together this mating season. First time she’s seen him in a dinner jacket.
Jay looked at her in surprise.
She looked down at herself in surprise. She wasn’t wearing anything at all.
Robin spread out her wings and flew up, switching on her internal sat nav. She navigated through the chandeliers, circled the ceiling, flicked a signal with her gorgeous tail feathers, and flew out along the flight path.
181 birders flew after her.
The woman weighed down by the camera in her G cup, and the man with the heavy Go Pro in his belt, were pinioned and despatched to a secure aviary.
David Howard, The perpetual bird
(pied oystercatcher, Long Beach Otago)
If a writer tries only to write the work will eventually feel desiccated, a skeletal leaf. For me such a constricted life, however publicly successful, must become a bibliography of loss.
That is why I take photographs; those representations of elsewhere are also transitional objects. By capturing one determinate time in the external world, I hope to open an indeterminate time in the internal world of the viewer, who is usually me.
But see here, there you are.
The trill of the pyds
Mark Kirkbride
“I keep two of them as pets.” Tet could hear the Krix’s voice leaking through the ceiling. “When they crashed here, they fought nonstop.” Tet glanced at Vrin. “I had to separate them.” They’d been on Tarz so long, he’d convinced himself he could understand. “Then I put them together… and got a third.” Tet turned to their daughter, playing on the floor with a pyd. “It’s growing. Soon it will be ready.”
He glanced at Vrin.
The edge of their cell had a slop-out chute, just big enough for an infant to fit through.
Perhaps in anticipation of this day, they hadn’t named her, and for a long time they’d had to stop her crawling out. Soon she would be too big.
He and Vrin kissed their daughter.
“Go, darling,” said Vrin. “Get away from here.”
They lowered her down through the chute onto the blue grass. With the edge of the wall digging into his cheek, he could make out the start of the red trees.
“Run, my love,” he said.
Her hand slipped through his.
They heard a soft whump, then an arh of curiosity, followed by a scampering getting further away until it faded into the trill of the pyds.
Burying their faces in each other’s shoulders, he and Vrin clung to each other. He shook with her sobs, she with his.
Was it the right thing to do?
Yes, shrilled the pyds.
A pyd lived for a Tarz day but every day the pyds sang.
Poporo tū ki te hamuti
Ben Prisk
I can think myriad things and see nothing. My eyes have been jostled out of my head. They hang, unseeing, behind my back. I feel my way to the station steps and pray my knees don’t collapse halfway up. Near the top a gust of wind rushes down and with it the voice of a woman above me. Just not me, please. It could be the scattered leaves conspiring to make me slip, or the sputtering taunting streetlights that induce my vertigo. The nausea gets caught in my skin and there it stays, itching, until I bend myself back before the ascent.
I don’t think I dare rise above the ground.
Where was I going again? It’s always back home. It’s somewhere over there, where people are captured still in paintings and weep for decorum. It’s the instrument of extension where poetry is strangled and distilled into song. It’s the lilting simplicity of a remembered place. It is there where someone put it in my head. The body transparent, the spirit grotesque. A backlit void lies ahead – don’t get distracted by the leaks. Look up! Who dares?
I haven’t seen a single thing above the treetops.
Feather by feather
Allen Ashley
Theo and I were bored with shepherding. We scanned the fields and the skies for wildlife.
“What’s that up there?” he said.
“Wow, I’ve never seen a bird that big in flight. The wingspan is wider than a human’s arms.”
“You’re right, I think there may be two of them. Could be a parent or a mating pair.”
We smirked at that. We were young and silly.
Eventually, the dazzling sunshine in the afternoon sky gave me bright flashes behind my eyes. I returned to my work. Theo was mumbling about what if there were some eggs, what would they taste like? Or imagine if we caught one of these huge birds, we could feast for days. I ignored him until much later when he called out that the bird was landing, now was our chance to spy its nest. We set off at pace, keeping one eye on our grassy footing and one on the cloudless sky.
“Landing? I think it’s falling.”
I was right, though I took no pleasure from the fact. Sea eagles roost on clifftops but this huge bird wasn’t going to make land, plunging haphazardly into the azure waves. We scurried down the rocks and scrub. The sand on the beach irritated my toes in my worn-out sandals.
At last the tide delivered. Dead, of course. Those wings. Intricately bound together, feather by feather, taut animal gut for rope around the human arms, streaked with melted red wax that mixed with the flying man’s blood.
Desiree Jung, Eagle stand
Parson bird, 1866
Liana Ashenden
Parson birds gargled above. Luke watched their white throats bobbing a duet and imagined sending a taxidermied specimen from the colony. “Here, Father, one made in your image.”
It was damp and cold in the bush. The mosses, ferns and dripping canopy created a scent unlike any other. Luke climbed a green boulder, his boots slipping until he reached the top. He tamped and lit his pipe. From this height Luke could see the mid-canopy. There. Almost indistinguishable. Tiny, epiphytic orchids hidden from the forest floor. He breathed out, watching tendrils swirl in a shaft of sunlight.
A branch snapped halfway up the Podocarpus totara. Luke braced twenty feet in the air, testing the weight of his exhilaration, and kept climbing. Clumps of ovoid pseudobulbs. Narrow leaves emerging from blue-grey lichen. Potentially a new species! He would present this holotype to the Royal Society.
Luke bagged the orchid, its substrate and consortium plants, descended with care, and retrieved a hipflask from his backpack. Time to celebrate.
His father would say, “Here is evidence of God’s abundance in the diversity of His creatures. Luke drank. Before the ship left for the colony, they had argued over Charles Darwin’s masterpiece while Mother begged them to stop. And yet Father had taught Luke to love nature. He’d even supported Luke’s Natural Sciences Tripos at Cambridge.
The bobbled clerics circled each other and landed in different trees. “There is no God!” Luke yelled. The black-cloaked birds paused and resumed singing.
Bird restaurant
Lesley Wallis
Down at the back of my garden I have a bird restaurant. I took the burner out of the old barbeque and then I painted it bright colours. We had dragged the barbeque from house to house, but hardly ever used it. Our weather doesn’t suit barbeques and anyway, I am not much of a barbecue fan. There is something wrong about men standing outside roasting bits of cow over coals, turning them with tongs. And there is something cruel and brutal about the flayed and splayed chicken carcasses, sizzling on the burning bars.
I painted the barbecue, put out food on shiny plates. I thought the birds might be attracted to that but it turns out they are not. They prefer to congregate at my neighbour’s house, chirping and pecking in chatty little groups. Are they saying, don’t go next door – it’s dangerous? I lure them with special bird biscuits but they take the food and leave immediately. They don’t hang round here. I think they know the history; they see through the fake restaurant, and the trickster in the garden. On the seemingly peaceful lawn, they sense the echo of their cousins, roasted and eaten.
Ghosts of the forest
Kathi Crawford
You find them quietly perched on the edges of meadows or forest openings – nearly invisible – but when they hit you with their mesmerizing stare, their yellow eyes boring through, like human eyes in a feathered suit – it’s like they know it’s time for you to take a leap of faith.
In this stage of my life, windows and doors are closing, and I am searching for an opening – a way out. Like the time I was lost in the woods behind my childhood home. I was trying to find the creek alone because my brother wouldn’t come with me. I was hell-bent on finding it. Lost, I frantically ran through the trees and brush to find the path to the backyard until, instead, the creek appeared, but at a different point along the water line. I sat on the edge catching my breath when my brother suddenly, quietly, appeared.
And now, the deep, booming hoot of the mysterious Strix nebulosa is calling me to clock out of corporate life, to trust the steps ahead. It’s time to stop playing this soul-robbing game; to break through the hard-packed snow and forage what’s beneath. I understand I am, as much as anyone, an endangered species seeking a way to live in the midst of impermanence. I can only hope to navigate this closing act of my life with the wingspan of the Great Grey Owl.
Anna (Nika) Nazarova-Evans, Sirin
Caging
Jenny Elliott
Panic squeezes my heart when I watch my daughter since his death. I fear the wild grief that has taken hold of her soul – and is leading her away.
She doesn’t turn to me. She turns to her familiar. To the bird. She and that sulphur-crested cockatoo are a beautiful pair. Alert and watchful. At any perceived danger – and they see a lot – his crest shoots upright. Her teenage eyes, heavily lined with black, retreat. He squawks their warning.
I scold and puff, and attempt to cage them both. She watches me with scorn. He hops away, keeping just out of reach, squawking.
At other times they are happy tricksters playing to a crowd. The bird can hold a beer can high in its beak and swill the contents, its beady eye challenging the drink’s owner to dare to retrieve it. She sticks out her pierced and armoured tongue, holding a morsal for the bird to peck. Delicately that beak, which can strip a beer can in seconds, pecks the grain from her tongue.
The bird knows my fear. And so does she. They know I panic about that beak tearing out her tongue. They know I am afraid of the dark.
I sell the bird.
Tūī
Sherryl Clark
Tūī are bullies, they say, but I don’t care. I hide in the bush under the punga ferns and watch the sunlight gleam on their green and black feathers, their white bibs fluttering as they scold and sing.
They are beautiful and tough, as tough as I want to be one day.
I hear Mum calling in the distance and drag myself out of the bush, across the paddocks, my gumboots slapping against my legs. I hope Monty won’t be home yet, but his ute is parked by the water tank and my guts sink down into my legs.
Mum is at the washing line, pegging out Joey’s sheets. Joey wets his bed; I’ve stopped wetting my pillow. Waste of good tears.
“You didn’t finish those dishes,” Mum says. “Better get in there now.”
I stand at the kitchen sink, my hands in the hot, soapy water, and he comes up behind me. I duck too late. His slap makes my ears ring. “Where’ve you been?”
“Checking the water trough in the top paddock.” I always have an answer ready.
“Yeah, sure. You been eyeing up that boy next door.” He sticks his hand between my legs. “Little slut.”
I twist away. “I’ll tell Mum you did that.”
He leans close, his breath stinking of beer. “She won’t believe you.”
I imagine a cloak of green and black feathers, like armour, around my shoulders, my sharp beak at his eyes. “I’ll make her believe me.”
Phoenix
Gillian O’Shaughnessy
She’ll no longer let it stand when men behind her in the queue are served first. She’ll push herself forward, and point the error out, she won’t smile and apologise to soften the interruption. She’ll dress as she pleases now. In the low-rise blue jeans he hated, or with her legs on show in a skirt that’s too short for a woman her age. Wear her lipstick scarlet, stop colouring her hair and the threads will gleam like silver crescent moons in a dark cloud sky. She’ll say no. Talk about hot flashes and mood swings. When she mentions sex and young women at the office crinkle their faces with disgust, remind her she’s old enough to be their mother, she won’t feel shame or fall silent. She’ll say, I know. She won’t look in the mirror before she leaves the house to remove one item because Coco said so. She’ll wear her best jewellery every day. Purple amethysts and rough-cut emeralds in rings of gold and long snake chains that fall between her breasts. Sleep raw and late. Roll in soft linen sheets of sage green bought with her own money. She’ll call the woman from the apartment across town, the one with the stone-white hair that falls to her waist like rain. She’ll ask if one night soon they might take flight together when the air is warm and as sweet-scented as ripe plums in summer and sweat runs in a smooth, cool trail down skin.
Kerry Lander, He manu e rere ana
Restless
June Pitman-Hayes
The girls were sleeping soundly when she crept out of the house.
Manu’s soft brown curls were spread out over her pillow. Miere, who sucked on her thumb when she slept, had a tiny pool of dribble collecting in the corner of her mouth.
She hadn’t expected to have children so young. It’d been forced upon her, and now here she was, a solo mum with two kids under four.
Outside the air was fresh and filled with promise. She pulled on her bathing suit. The spandex felt more constrictive than usual. She’d put on a bit of weight and was starting to show.
How was she going to tell them there’d be another mouth to feed come Christmas? She could almost hear their harsh reactions. She remembered how ashamed she’d felt before when it hadn’t been her fault.
At least this one’s of my choosing. She stepped off the verandah and headed down the track toward the beach.
At the far end, the flow of a freshwater stream had carved out a tract of grainy sand that made it easy to wade out among the oyster-shelled seabed.
The cool seawater crept up, and into the space between fibre and body. Her skin prickled. She held her breath, then eased herself in, and back.
Buoyed by the sea, she felt the restlessness inside herself soothe and slip away.
At last she was weightless. Floating unburdened, and as free as the grey kōtuku that dipped and dived in the shallows.
Nesting
Sara Crane
When you put me aside I didn’t know that I was the baby girl in your story. The one who arrived in a leaky basket, washed high up on the shore with the king tides.
You chucked the empty vessel over the fence under the big macrocarpa. A pair of spur-winged plovers, tūturiwhatu, found it. And nested there. Laid eggs.
This part of the story can’t be true. Any self-respecting tūturiwhatu makes a simple scrape on the ground. Some twigs and grasses, a few pebbles. A car park or a roof.
You told about the fledglings. Cuddled up to their monogamous parents, being fed and reared in safety. I don’t think so. The ones I know fend for themselves shortly after hatching. The scrappy nests get trodden on by careless cattle.
Over time the baby in the story disappeared. You never mentioned me again. Do you ever wonder what happened?
I have grown as screechy as a masked lapwing. Frills for looks rather than practicality. I am self-nurtured, and unprotected.
This is my story for you.
I never meant to be blown ashore. I wanted to sail across the ocean in a seaworthy curragh. I wanted to find caregivers of some sort. To be fed and rocked and sung to and kept warm. I didn’t find them.
And I was forgotten. Left.
Now, the tūturiwhatu live by my stretch of bush. They lay their olive eggs by the track. The llamas sniff them and walk on.
Broken wings
Sandy Feinstein
A child chases a fat pigeon, catches up with it, grabs it still living. Its wing is broken. The bird is bigger than it seemed wobbling near her yard. She is unable to keep from dragging its tail. It must be bathed before it can be fixed, she thinks. She fills a big steel tub with warm water, adds blue shampoo. A prism of bubbles rise.
She can’t get the soap off the feathers. She lays the bird gently on a towel, pats it dry. Puts a bandage on its wing. She doesn’t notice when its limbs go limp, its head lolls.
Would the bird have died anyway, she will often wonder when she is older. No one actually likes pigeons. City pests fed crumbs from park benches, mostly by children and old people. She doesn’t feed them in the park. She notices their iridescence.
Rock doves, she knows now. They live in the eaves of an old barn, take turns swooping from their perch there to the hollow under the stone bridge where she walks. Cliff swallows skim the air above the creek for bugs. A great blue heron keeps watch. What does it know? Its voice is impenetrable. But she listens, trying to forget how hard it is to heal.
Keith Nunes, Ducky
Between here and there
Charlotte Hamrick
Blearily, her eyes struggle to open. Goo from a purgatory of sleep stretches between her crusty lids as she turns to the window. Only shadows flicker beyond the glass, beyond her 80 square foot room, where she remembers the riotous colors of changing seasons. Before her failing body landed in a steel trap bed in this gray-walled room. She hears a soft pecking sound from the window. Stumbling to the window seat, she splays her swollen-knuckled hand against the pane. It looks like her grandmother’s hand. A delicate apricot-tinged beak taps from the other side, shining eyes meet hers. The window shimmers and her hand breaches the glass as if it were a porous membrane. Her body slips through, follows the feathered guardian into the wide open sky, the earth falling beneath her untethered body.
Mrs Hobbs and the tūī
Trish Gribben
Mangungu, Hokianga 1838
Mrs Hobbs is wishing the tūī would tuck its beak in its ruffle of white feathers so she can delay washday a little longer, at least until the sun appears above the kauri trees, those giants that keep her husband engaged with the New Zealanders as they pit-saw logs to make a home.
Last night her husband read one of his favourite passages: Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
Mrs Hobbs struggled with her thoughts, none of them suitable for this candle-lit moment.
She wonders if she is oozing blood, or if she is just damp from fever. She hopes her calico nightgown scrunched between her thighs is mopping up any discharge. Mrs Hobbs has been indisposed for weeks now as one miscarriage followed another and both followed the death of her infant George. Then she thinks it’s all in the hands of the Lord. He has taken my darling babe; now George lies in his little box in the cold grave near my precious sprouting acorns. Coping with washday is of no matter.
A tūī chortles: Āmene.
Sunday rituals
Amanda Hurley
There’s a finger of light curling through the trees. Daylight has barely begun, but the dog is up and the fresh winter’s morning is beckoning a sugared welcome. My footsteps cut through the dawned silence, my boots breaking the layer of ice that has settled overnight on the snow. I will have to wait months for birdsong to fill this forest again. All the winged creatures are south, settled in warmer climes. The dog has a plan of his own; I see the tip of his avine tail flitting between the trees. The pines, curved like a cathedral, vault high above my head.
A light wind is bothering the trees like a child’s swing in a playground; rhythmically, the firs scrape and strain. Perhaps if I listen long enough, I’ll catch the words in their voices. Suddenly the dog is by my side, his tail long and pointed, straight as a ruler. He stands alert, quivering, his body straining into the distance. As I walk on, he matches me, step for step, a beat ahead. He is protecting me, I realise, as he begins to bark, his deep voice splitting the silence. There is no rustle of branches ahead. As we walk on, I see no tracks. Whatever animal was there, it is gone, scared by the dog’s loud baritone.
We turn for home, towards the promise of breakfast and the rustle of the Sunday print. There is ice on my eyelashes by the time we reach the car.
Mike Perusse, The Bird Show
November, 1963
Marybeth Rua-Larsen
There is no backstory. No memory. No tale, just a wisp of an anecdote pried out of my mother’s mouth when I begged. She told so few stories but said she held me that day, all day, the two of us spooned together in a rocking chair, waiting for updates on our old black and white while she cried about Kennedy. I was too young to remember, but after that day, my parents switched off the news – it was Kimba the White Lion after school, Dark Shadows when no parent was looking, and Bruins hockey, my dad shouting Goal! late into the night, but no news. And like the eyespot on a peacock’s feather, what at first calls my attention disappears into display, into flickering pattern, with so much plumage, I cannot see the bird. That was the beginning – of the rattling train of assassinations, of camouflaged soldiers in Vietnam, charging into and carried out of the forest, of the thorn-faced critics of integrated busing in Boston, none of which I would see. Watch the peacock, they said, with its shimmering, cerulean head, spread its feathers into an arch of eyespots on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, all staring me down, demanding an acknowledgement of beauty when I was surrounded by everything but.
At least seven states of being Jolly
Janean Cherkun
Shortly after Jolly was dragged by a domestic animal to the neighbour’s veranda, to pose atop warm concrete, feet in the sun; humans laughed at him. Unfair! He wasn’t naked, still wearing black-and-white feathers, despite the feline bite marks.
This journey of Jolly’s to his latest state was only partially down to a cat showing off to its mistress. But he’d known many states: best ocean life state, flung around rocks state: nothingness… dead as expected state.
Beach-combed by a family state; the Dad with strange ideas about taxidermy. Frozen solid state where he’d made friends, like PoP, the packet of peas. Wherever he went, Jolly sensed familiar lurking from enemies primed in fully loaded life/death indices. Then the icehouse electrics shorted, and PoP sighed, “Circle of life? Oh, go on then.”
Destined for discard state. Jolly lounged upon grass clippings (during backyard thaw state) loaded on the trailer. PoP’s breath of browning peas, declaring them mulch, depressing.
Girl, always playing outside, went sneaking over to pillage next-door-lady’s lemon tree, and clocked Jolly being gawped at by that lady. The lady had stopped still like a crab in coral, clutching a paper bag to her chest, after disembarking from her bicycle to find Jolly lying in state on the doormat.
The girl gestured at him, telling the lady, “Found Jolly at Smugglers after a storm. He’s been living in our freezer.”
They agreed on burying him near the pepper tree.
Jolly had known trees before. Great undulating forests under water.
Moulting
Kai Holmwood
The first thing people noticed about Burtown was, to this story, irrelevant. So were the second and even fifteenth things. The night watchman, whom visitors would have seen if they were allowed to stay overnight, might have been higher on the list. But if someone passing through were attentive enough, they might observe the quirk that gets to the point: Burtown was utterly, enforcedly devoid of cats.
*
The change came every night.
Councillor Jones, with his overly formal suits and puffed-out chest, turned to a penguin. Ethel, Frederick, and Mabel transformed into grey warblers that flitted around observing everything and never being quiet about any of it. The fiercely solitary Tamsen, to no one’s surprise, vanished into each night as a falcon. Teenaged Jake became a robin, strutting around and tilting his head skeptically as he side-eyed the world.
Only that night watchman, who had been hired from outside Burtown, was immune to the change – or, perhaps, excluded by it.
*
The change came every night, and the watchman watched, not for crime, but for cats. Seeing none, he watched himself instead for any sign of transformation, but found only the stubborn grip of his own humanity.
*
Change came one morning in the form of a fantail. It spread its feathers as if to catch the breaking sunlight, as immune to transformation as the watchman itself, and then darted away. In the early light, the watchman stood alone, yearning for the lost comfort of a purring warmth beneath his hand.
Rata Ingram, Korimako one-noter, digital illustration
Dream girl
Faith Allington
I wonder why my clone can sing. I’ve never been able to hold a single note. At parties and karaoke, I’d learned to keep my voice low. Once, I forgot to keep quiet – until a friend’s horrified smirk pierced my heart.
My clone goes to all the parties now. She wears my face and opens my mouth for songs I’ve always longed to sing. She is radiant in green and purple sequins, in the black velvet boots I’ve always wanted to wear. The light catches in her pink hair, glints on her teeth as she laughs. She can dance, too.
Everyone else sends their clones to work as many days as the legal limit allows. The clones’ eyes fade from translucent sky to drowning fog. Their skin acquires a chalky tinge, hangs heavy on their steel bones. The cubicles don’t care how you were fabricated, they’ll feed on anything that can feel.
Each night my clone offers to stay home. But like a wild thing, I know it would hurt her to stay caged in this apartment. I never want her to claw herself out of my arms to be free. So, each night she vanishes into the concrete dark, her heels a staccato of joy.
At the mandatory human-only holiday party, my coworkers beg me to sing. I shake my head, tasting the copper of secrets on my tongue. My clone is the prettiest bird of all, but this imperfect song belongs to me alone.
Life list
Beth Sherman
The flicker landed on a branch of the twisted pine and began tapping the trunk for ants. Braden took one look and spit in disgust.
“Let’s wait a little longer,” I said, watching the light drain from the sky. “Something better might come along.”
Braden’s expression contorted, either from pain or disappointment.
Since the accident our bird watching was limited to our backyard. I say we although the truth is I was free to go anywhere.
When Braden flipped to the back of the Peterson and began ripping out pages, I didn’t realize until it was too late.
“Stop it,” I said, lunging for the book. But his upper body was in good shape, and he was stronger than me.
Our life list was a part of us, like the child we’d never have and though so much was lost – sex, income, trust, maybe even love – the list was something we still shared. Now it was scattered over the grass, like confetti.
“Doesn’t matter anymore,” Braden said, slumping in his wheelchair. The defeat in his voice made me tired.
I looked up at the pine tree. The flicker had gone.
“That time in Costa Rica, was it a stripe-tailed hummingbird or a violet-bellied?”
I pictured iridescent green feathers, the whirring of tiny wings, how Braden and I held our breaths while our hummingbird trembled in the air.
“Stripe-tailed.” I wrote it down, approximating the date.
“You’re a fool,” he said, not unkindly, and I knew he was right.
Who has seen the nest of the kuaka?
Heather McQuillan
The day the godwits return like flapping wind, mist descends and wraps cold arms over the estuary mouth. After their arduous journey, it is a poor welcome but the marine worms are plump and plentiful.
Alice, who has been tracking their progress on the Internet, rugs up in her long down coat, ties her sturdy boots and grabs a coffee on the way to greet her beloved birds. She stands, camera ready, beneath wind-bent trees and stares across the grey-brown landscape for a glimpse of the grey-brown flock. Shapes swirl in the mist. A pair of Canadian geese rise and flap freely overhead.
The voices reach her first. Quick nasal sounds. Warnings. Then silence as the shifting mist parts to reveal the family. The father is wrapped in a grey coat, the mother and three children in soft browns, hats down and collars up, all in narrow black boots and carrying bulging packs. Deep footprints suck water in their wake.
The father raises a bone-thin hand in warning. They halt. Breaths are held. Alice’s too. Then one of the children’s dark eyes, sunken in a face pinched by hunger, meets hers. It squawks. The group flurries to the shore, stumbling as mud clings to their boots. They tug each other onward to the grass bank.
“Go back to where you came from!” Alice yells.
The godwits lift in a noisy cloud and take flight.
Annabel Wilson, nest found in the corner of the chapel on Kamau Taurua
Bluebird
Alice Kinerk
Her foot was off the pedal by then. She watched a lovely blue songbird flap up from the hood of her car. Then a single dewy feather floated down. The sight felt cartoonish. Perhaps she laughed.
After, she rubbed at the back of her neck, looked dispassionately out the other window, where traffic hurtled by at an angle. She was still luxuriating in the riptide of the road. Feeling calm and pleasant.
But that bird! Where had it gone? She leaned forward against the steering wheel and looked up at the unblinking sun of mid-July. She leaned so far her breast pressed the horn, and she jumped.
She opened her door, or tried to. It was jammed on a hillock. Grass seed flew at her. She pressed herself into the narrow space between car and earth.
She stood, then fell. There was pain in her neck and head. Her whole right leg was jelly. She flopped to her back. There was the blue bird, flapping in circles above her. She thought, The world is full of senseless beauty. Perhaps she even spoke it.
But then the bird flew away, disappearing on the other side of the highway. She forced herself to her feet to follow it. Trepidation hung darkly in the back of her mind, but she ignored it.
Wasn’t the bluebird a symbol of happiness? And wasn’t pursuing happiness her right, her pathway to success?
All this, in the last sixty seconds of life.
The ravens of Stonehenge
Ryan Padraic
We walked the dusty, broken backroad to Stonehenge, while other, more fiscally frivolous travellers wobbled past in uncertain BMWs, kissing every pothole. Surrounded by wide, green fields and grazing lambs, we told ourselves this could be New Zealand; though the fields would be ‘paddocks’, and the short, twitching tails of the sheep completely severed.
And no ravens.
They sat sleek on every second fencepost, heads cocked, staring obliquely like little one-eyed Odins. Hideous household guards of whatever gods our ancestors worshipped within that distant ring of stones.
Of the monument, we had expected more: atop a commanding hill, or in the clearing of a haunted forest. But there was only farmland, as bland as the gravel beneath the campervans and hire cars huddled on the outskirts of the henge. There were guards, but no fences: a low rope was all that separated us from the walking path, which cost a night’s accommodation to amble along. We remained content with our affordable distance, waiting patiently until the other tourists stepped out of frame, before snapping rapid selfies, as we had done at all the other landmarks. Illusions of unique experience.
Later, as we trudged back up the road in silence, we passed a scattering of tents on the grassy verge – sealed up, their thin shells rippling against the wind. “Homeless?” my girlfriend whispered.
I nodded. Among them, a piece of netting stretched between the fence and a dead branch: a makeshift cage in which a lone, perplexed raven hopped about.
This passing world
Alex Reece Abbott
Cara wanders beneath the fat Beaver Moon, a burnished amber jewel hanging low in the heavy sky, signalling that dam-building will soon begin. On the chilling breeze, buzzards hover over the rapeseed, keen to detect death’s chemical signal. Beauty breaks down and rebuilds, especially in a mast year.
Now that summer’s fragrant bombardment has eased, in cooler, drier air she can detect more, her payoff for the fading beauty of damper, darker autumn days. Before she was born, her unique lexicon of smells began developing, a complex bio-chemical cocktail. She breathes in nature’s rich, aromatic call, a direct line to elusive feelings. With a magical, invisible formula, she reads the seasons. Blackbirds peck wild apples that rot in long, wet grass, yeasty windfall cider. Head-clearing pine resin diffuses through the forest. Mushrooms fruiting on the damp woodland floor release an earthy musk. Cara drinks dark, rich wine from blackberries fermenting on vines, recoils from pungent stinkhorn. Flaming leaves flutter, wistful aerial dancers surrendering to mulch’s sweet decay. A ghost owl on the fencepost cleans her bloody talons, watching her. Underfoot, slumbering bulbs fatten.
Cara wanders home to bake sticky, spicy bonfire parkin, her answer to Samhain’s summons. All around her, the past meets what will be. With guilty pleasure, she lights the fire, peat’s sweet reek inviting her to recharge, to hunker down. She draws close to the range, listening to the ragged-winged ravens who pierce the dusk, keening for this passing world.
Desiree Jung, yellow link
Doves
Laila Miller
She skips, alone, along the close-enough space where waves might lap her feet, where a king wave could steal her body. Beyond the foreshore, driftwood haunts the beach. The tide’s memory is sketched in lines of rusty kelp.
She picks up a sea cookie, lays it flat on her palm, brushes it with her thumb. Her hair flies up and away like a seagull’s wing. Among the rocks, waves crash.
He leaves the safety of a sheltered dune, asks what she sees.
“Five points, like a starfish.” Her fingers trace the radial pattern. She inhales the salt-sand, takes one step with him toward his dune.
“They chew sand, you know,” he says. He wants to be quicker, but fears he’ll frighten her.
She grinds her teeth, laughs. She can’t imagine chewing sand.
“They’re not like us.” He pushes prickly seaweed out of the way with his heel. Another step back. “Give it a shake.”
She rattles it, eyes sparkling ocean-bright. “Should I?”
He nods. They cross the kelp line.
She cracks it. Out spill tiny white bird shapes, shining like pearls.
“Some say they’re coins dropped by mermaids. Some say doves. But they’re actually teeth.”
“No way.” She places each one in a V pattern, raises her palm at eye level, squints. “Five.”
Someone shouts. She wraps the doves tight into a fist, waves with her other arm.
He turns for the safety of his dune.
“Come on,” she says.
He can’t say no.
Behind them, a king wave breaks.
Robin
John Paul Caponigro
BB gun. The deal was no animals of any kind. Tin cans, glass bottles, paper targets. Don’t tell me boys will be boys. My lizard got the better part of me. My fight wanted another’s flight. Hunger turned to envy. I broke my promise.
Sick, less for breaking it, more for the mess I had made of wings and their loss of soaring. I never shot another bird again. I could not hunt the thing I wanted most, and possession of the body who had it was no comfort.
For a long time, penance was feeding beaks, with or without songs. Now, having accepted so many other things about myself and the world, I’ve finally learned again to take joy in others’ flights.
Silence
Marty Beauchamp
I was rummaging for a beanie I’d packed thinking kiwis know a cold winter. Black ice had stopped the trains to make a liar of me.
The panel windows of the French doors held the frost at their edges, and the postage stamp backyard beyond was so quiet I stepped lightly as if not wanting to disturb.
Tall shrubs had hunkered down against the slatted fences, they hung so heavily that drained of all colour their branches seemed to disappear into the dusted lawn.
A flash of red crossed the space, and back again, flitted side to side so that the smallest of avalanches fell from the tallest hawthorn.
It was all those Christmas cards strung across the mantelpiece every year at home in one and I rushed about searching out the big camera used yesterday for shots of Big Ben and red phone boxes, in a time when you hoped the shot counter didn’t show you needed more film.
He was gone when I pushed the doors open and stepped out. The few hardy sparrows too.
I threw my head back and blew hard so that my disappointment streamed out to the colourless sky.
An eeriness made me think the neighbour’s cat might have been lurking somewhere near, drawn by the movement.
A gentle shadow ran away across the terrace roofs, a Pied Piper seeming to take the very last of the sound of the morning with it, and at last Concorde ghosted past, engines off.
Mike Perusse, The Bird Show, Face to Face
End of day
Mazz Scannell
The shadows outside are deepening as Jack speaks of the old days, when he had to run behind the horse to sow the paddock. Flinging his right hand in a high arc. The wheat seeds catch the sun before falling back into the dark soil. In his peripheral memory he sees the blackbirds mooching around, pretending they are there for another reason.
Today, he says, it’s different – better and worse. His cloudy eyes look out of the implement shed across a sea of lettuce green shoots. The blackbirds are here too, intent on plant destruction. He ignores them. It’s a blush, he says, just a promise. We have a few months to go yet.
Matt balances himself on a broken chair, quietly wobbling on three legs. He chews on a twig. It’s all very well, he says, but we just need one heavy rain and the whole paddock will be swimming. I think we should fix up the field drains earliest.
A dark cloud of blackbirds rises from the paddock. The shadow fleetingly darkens the open door as we laugh. We all know the field drains will take months to fix because they are 60 years old. Knowing that to do it properly we would have to retire the paddock. The farm couldn’t handle it. Dom speaks for us all: “Mate, we will have to win Lotto to do that.” We all nod, silently thinking of our lucky numbers.
Swallows
Deb Jowitt
“Zig-Zags?” Eddie squints at our shopping list. “Back to your old habits?”
Eddie’s writing has big loops and generous full stops. He’s added three grinning heads after Gordon’s gin. Mine is a cramped scrawl, useless for lists. Results are patchy on shopping days.
Our favourite nephew is coming to stay. He’s a roadie, all writhing tattoos and mind-altering substances. We enjoy his company, partly because our failings pale beside his.
My trolley bristles with bacon, sausages, legs of lamb – tonic on top for the ride. But when our nephew arrives, he announces he’s gone vegan. He’s lost weight too, glows with purpose. His teeth are fixed. Where did the money come from?
I open a can of beans for him and cook sausages for us. Eddie is half-cut; the boy sips his kombucha. He asks about a loan; he knows Eddie is a soft touch by early evening. But we’re not gone yet, despite our excesses.
I slip out, sit on the back steps where I can watch the swallows dart in the dimming light. Roll up, take three long tokes. The first is calming, the second starts me coughing, the third – peace descends. Silhouettes of flitting birds merge with the night.
When I come in, Eddie is snoring in his chair. Our nephew is at the stove, cutting up a sausage. He’s inherited Eddie’s indulgent streak.
“Wondered if they taste the same,” he says.
“One is never enough,” I reply.
“You’re right,” he says, cutting into another banger.
The whiskey jack
Tom Gadd
A hand sized bird lands beside a campfire. Eyes the cooking food. Ruffles its feathers that are grey as if in mimicry of the smoke swirling around it.
One hundred years ago the pine and maple forests were felled by axes and the lumberjacks said as bold as brass when this grey bird picked crumbs from around their feet during meals. They called it whiskey jack after mishearing a Cree man who brought them fresh fish naming it Wisakedjak.
It is morning and the lake is silver, and the whiskey jack takes bannock from our fingers.
In the Yukon, they tell of a hunter lost, starving, who is guided home by this grey bird. If one visits you in the morning it is a good omen.
The canoe is pulled up on the rocks and dripping. The grey bird greets our return to camp with a weeping sound and a peep.
When the winter snow is deep and most of the north is sleeping, the whiskey jack will make its nest and brood eggs in weather that could turn fingers black and useless.
Our tent dismantled and packed, the grey bird cocks its head and swoops to take the last of our camp bread.
The whiskey jack makes hundreds of caches around the forest. Bannock, spiders, fish flesh tucked into tree crevasses and bark holes that freeze in the winter and keep it healthy, but a warming planet thaws the caches, and they rot, and the whiskey jacks are starving.
Liana Ashenden, Watcher
Mollies
Tim Hennessey
Light leached like blood into the horizon. It felt good to cast off. What with Julie leaving, and the price of fuel. It had been a shit year.
The diesel Cummins roared, and the truckle of wake became a torrent as the rusted hull passed the sea wall. Liberty showed her nose to the sou’wester – the smell of the sub-Antarctic. He pointed her toward the sun.
An hour out mollies circled the boat. Long, sweeping loops, rising and falling with the freshening breeze – lots of birds for the time of year. He slowed the engine and Liberty started to yaw in the heavy swell.
A group of mollymawks were rafting in the distance. He didn’t usually go out alone but Dan the deckie was at his sister’s wedding. Besides, today was different. He motored towards the birds. They disappeared behind each wall of oily green swell and appeared again. Peek-a-boo. Maybe a dead seal or a small whale? Scavengers, cannibals.
He killed the power and allowed the boat to drift into the rookery. A few birds startled and left, but the rest were too busy ripping and tearing at the rancid flesh of a baby seal. He put on oilskins and thick rubber gloves. Pulled a fish bin from the stern. It was heavy, 60 kilos. And he started to feed the mollies. Thick lumps of wrinkled flesh, caked with fresh blood.
When he’d finished, he genuflected. Poured the residue into the secret ocean. And turned for home.
The morendo
Yedidyah Herrero
One morning I awoke to find all the birds gone. No mockingbirds speaking in tongues. No mourning doves stretching their bassoons. No pigeon flocks turning like galleons in the wind. All gone, replaced by insects grown into their berths, from hoppy wee finch size to terrible large eagles and somewhere, perhaps, portly ostrich-tall locusts. Gone too their solo songs, the trills, the strains, the melodies, and refrains deposed by a stridulent buzz, a collective hum, the eternal friction of mechanic leg on hollow belly. It resonated in my skull with a sympathetic vibration that rattled my thoughts from signal to noise. I asked the men in my village McDonalds, where are the birds? What birds, they asked. I asked the Book, but the Book’s OS had gone extinct. Ai-ai-ai, I cried, and AI answered, I don’t know that word, bird. So I asked my pouch-mate, what of the plumage of many colors, what of the blithe spirit, what of the light-winged Dryad of the trees and she said, don’t you think that was always too much to ask?
Mike Perusse, The Bird Show, autumn in Massachusetts
Flight
Lynley Soper
There is a bird I like to visit, on cold days when the museum across the road offers a refuge.
He is Kāruhiruhi – and I visit him because I think he is the bird in my painting.
In the museum, he is preserved behind glass, his head set at an awkward angle, feathers dull and dry.
But in my painting he lifts from the waves, saltwater dripping from his outstretched wings. A young kahawai dangles helplessly from his long beak.
I learn that fishermen consider him competition for their catch. He is ensnared in their lines. Sometimes he is shot at.
Once, he was captured on paper by a watercolourist on Cook’s second voyage, documented in a collection of flora and fauna for an eager world.
Earlier, did tangata whenua covet his feathers for decoration, or roast him over open fires on the beach? Was he competition for kai moana then also?
And earlier still, when the skies were full of birds and the sea of fish and the dark forest touched the shoreline. Was there a time when Kāruhiruhi and all the other birds were the colonisers?
Or did they come with the land as it drifted south and east – already here when the first people pulled their waka onto the beach, and the first sailing ships entered these waters?
In my painting, it is early, first light on a flat sea and Kāruhiruhi takes to the sky.
It is his.
Soar
Bernard Steeds
It wasn’t so much that I believed I could fly as that no-one told me I couldn’t. To most, it was inconceivable. They saw me hopping and skittering along their burning pavements and thought it comical; to them I could barely walk, so why should they warn me not to leap?
But I’d seen the others. When they thought no-one was looking, they’d cast themselves from rooves, sometimes with hesitation and scrabbling feet, sometimes without effort, open armed, tilt and rise in the morning air. If it is good for them, why not me?
So I climb the fence, swing onto the guttering, clamber up and over the carapace. I slide down the other side, tearing my skin on rusted clouts. At the edge, overlooking the bank, the gully, the narrow wending stream, I stand, think back on the lines of my life – the borders crossed, the doors closed, not because of my words or actions, but because I am feathered and beaked. I will live with this exclusion no more. Further down the valley I see homes on their quarter acres; I see apartment buildings; I see high-rise buildings, insurers and banks, their logos lit in neon. I see ocean, boiling and rising. I spread my wings. I rise. I glide. I soar over all.
Sheila Brown – Wonderous flight
Sheila Brown’s art makes up the banner image of Flash Frontier. When we think of birds, we think of her colourful strokes and vibrant, moving wings on canvas. Here is her note about this painting, ‘Wondrous Flight’.
I find acrylics suit my style of painting the best. I can achieve the most wonderful tones and shades that have become very characteristic of my work, which some would describe as a cross over style: abstract and expressionism.
Although I do enjoy all subject matter, birds are a constant theme, something that I adore, and one that is very close to my heart with the amount of endangered birds that are threatened.
Whether it is the wee pīwakawaka, one of the smallest birds yet full of endless energy and chatter, often known as a messenger of news, or change, or the sacred kingfisher, his hunched silhouette waiting patiently, on an elevated perch over an estuary or mudflat, or, in my case, a powerline as I do my daily work. Always there, above, watching me.
‘Wondrous Flight’, a moment in time, when the kingfisher and the pīwakawaka pass one another, or as they share the skies and land. I am never short of inspiration, for the birdlife in Aotearoa New Zealand is endless and upon my doorstep. I try to capture this moment, for one to remember how lucky we are to have our feathered friends.