Writings inspired by birds are saturated with sorrow about those that have gone

A selection of writing about the country’s original inhabitants is suffused with sorrow.

ANelson man was recently convicted of shooting a kea because the “absolutely protected” birds were causing damage at his property. His sentence was just 200 hours of community work.

Only about 5000 kea remain in the wild, so it’s timely that an extract from Philip Temple’s kea-classic Beak of the Moon is included in Bird Words, a pure celebration of our avian friends. It’s saluting, not shooting, birds.

Temple’s book, published in 1981, was an eccentric exercise in anthropomorphism that gave his small tribe of kea names like Strongbeak, and portrayed them as moody tough guys who enjoy a lusty screech.

Bird Words, edited by Elisabeth Easther, is rewarding on many fronts. It traces the history of our close engagement with birds from the earliest colonial discoveries (and killings) to the evolution of a far more nurturing culture.

It features a careful balance of 62 works of fiction, essays and poetry, some of which will be new to many readers.

It is also pretty, complemented by the dainty drawings of natural history illustrator Lily Daff, artworks first commissioned by the New Zealand Native Bird Protection Society (now Forest & Bird) in 1927 and 1931 to raise awareness that many of our species were under threat.

The great sorrow that permeates Bird Words is that so many have gone. We can only mourn the loss of species like the giant eagles (see the essay Haast’s Eagle, by Richard Holdaway, who studies prehistoric birdlife); the moa (Jon Gadsby’s poem Moa); and the huia (Claire O’Loughlin’s witty conversation, Huia, between four of the birds: “My tail feathers aren’t for pretty hats, they’re for flying!”

Introduced birds get attention, too: Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station details the sparrow’s dispersion down the length of the country; Frank Sargeson’s A Hen and Some Eggs recalls “the most anxious time I’ve ever experienced in my life”; Judith White’s The Elusive Language of Ducks portrays the transformative powers of a duckling.

Some of the writing is heart-wrenching: in an extract from Laurence Fearnley’s novel Reach, a man frenziedly tries to save a shag trapped on a rocky coast by a mass of fishing lines.

And Easther’s late mother, Shirley Maddock, is here too, with an extract from Islands in the Gulf, a book accompanying a TV series she made in the 1960s, refilmed by her daughter for screening next year. Here, Maddock leads us on a trail across Little Barrier Island. Her writing exudes a wonderful stillness.

Why do we love birds so? Perhaps we can turn to Michael King’s Janet and the Birds, an extract from The Silence Beyond: Selected Writings, compiled by his daughter Rachael King in 2011. King and Janet Frame, both mortally ill, are discussing the implications of a morepork staring through the window of a house King was visiting, a portent, they believe, of death.

But King had left the room. “The owl came looking for you. And you weren’t there. That might mean you’re reprieved,” she tells him.

Sadly, both are no longer with us. But the inclusion of their writing – Frame’s

The Birds Began to Sing is also in this collection – is one of the many reasons Bird Words sings so directly to the heart. BIRD WORDS, edited by Elisabeth Easther (Vintage, $35)