Environment – Every bird’s a winner

Conservation shouldn’t be a popularity contest, even though it usually is, just like life. Conservation certainly imitates politics during Forest & Bird’s annual Bird of the Year competition. There is a chorus of lobbying. There’s rule breaking (the peka peka – a bat – won once), foreign interference (US celebrity John Oliver exerted undue influence last year), rigged votes, and it’s a nice little sideshow, but it doesn’t change the fundamental problems with the system.

So this year, it was challenging for me to choose my five best birds. Every bird species has its distinctive and amazing qualities, and every individual bird’s life matters. Just like in politics, high profile advocacy campaigns and lobbying favour the glamorous, already potentially privileged and well-known birds. I try to counteract that popularity bias by voting for the ‘underbirds’, though I confess that when one campaigner implored me to vote for the skua and I didn’t think it had a chance, I didn’t vote for it. But skuas deserve recognition – and probably protection – too.

This year, the hoiho, or yellow-eyed penguin, was crowned Bird of the Year. The hoiho waddled home with more than 6000 of the 52,000 votes cast. Hoiho numbers have declined by 78 per cent in the last 15 years, due to predators, dog attacks and set nets. But they were endorsed by Helen Clark, Chris Hipkins and Dr Jane Goodall, so maybe that’s some sort of political poll too. In second place was the karure, or black robin, a globally important conservation story if there ever was one, with its rebound from only five birds left in the world to an estimated 300 robins now.

Other birds in this year’s top 10 were kākāpō, kākā, kea, and kōkako, the tawaki, piwakawaka, toroa and takahe.

None of my votes made the top 10 bird hit list. My choices were mostly shy and unassuming, cryptic and crepuscular; liminal denizens subsisting on the edge of ecologies and people’s consciousness.

I voted for the shy matuku-hūrepo, or Australasian bittern, a statuesque wetland inhabitant, globally endangered along with its habitat. I voted for the pūweto, another shy wetland bird occupying the shadows, on the margins of both wetlands and survival. I voted for the southern dotterel. Southern dotterels, or pukunui, only breed on mountain tops in Rakiura Stewart Island, and feed on some Southland estuaries and beaches in winter. They were once widespread around the South Island. Now there are just 101 of them.

I also voted for the kororā, not one of the winning two penguins, and currently also losing out to car strike, starvation and predation. My final vote went to tara iti, the most endangered of them all, with only 40 birds and nine breeding pairs left, all local to us.

Birds are miracles of evolution and biology. Warm-blooded but not mammals and descended from dinosaurs. With their nest-building skills (some rudimentary), migrations, courtship rituals, breeding habits, niche occupation, feathers and flight (or waddle or walk), to me, every bird’s a winner.