Bird lady’s happy feat
Sylvia Durrant has spent her life taking lost, injured and stranded birds under her wing. She speaks with Jodi Yeats.
It’s very fulfilling. It’s busy, and I’m never bored.
Sylvia Durrant
The unusually hot summer has been hard on seabirds, especially the world’s smallest penguins. Consequently, hundreds, if not thousands, of little blue penguins have washed up exhausted, starving, or dead, on North Island beaches.
When Aucklanders find the distressed birds, more often than not they take them to Sylvia The Bird Lady, as she is described on her website, which also lists her landline and North Shore address. She’s ‘‘open 24 hours’’.
Sylvia Durrant, 85, an Auckland pensioner who has devoted her life to caring for rescued birds, waves toward her charges: ‘‘It’s an absolute joy, isn’t it.’’
At low tide, on an overcast weekday, the sea, sky and Hauraki Gulf islands are all various shades of flint, Campbells Bay ochre.
The native penguins, korora¯, are swimming around vigorously, with a young border collie watching their every move, as Annwyne Standish, Durrant’s offsider, standing in the pool.
‘‘They have so much fun, and we have so much fun watching them,’’ Durrant says.
The pair are chatterboxes and have screeds of penguin information for a group of adults and toddlers who have gathered to watch the daily ritual.
Durrant explains the penguins were confused and, unusually, nested a second time in January.
Unfortunately, this is when the adults go to sea to feed and build up strength before the late summer moult, where they stay on land for three weeks.
The abandoned baby penguins were forced to go looking for food before they were waterproof, and at a time when they were too young to swim and fish.
Bernie, who has only one flipper, is already tuckered out from swimming in circles. He toddles towards a large turquoise bin, where he is happy to rest and wait for the others. At 18 months old and with a disability, ‘‘he’s a permanent’’, Durrant says.
Most birds are returned to the wild, with Sylvia asking visitors who live out of town to take a bird with them to release.
Sylvia points out one penguin, which is swimming erratically and splashily across the rock pool.
‘‘He’s swimming beautifully,’’ she says. ‘‘He’s not usually that good.’’
A moment later he is bobbing up and down on the spot, splashing, and twirling frenetically.
He’s called Kinky, because ‘‘he’s weird’’ and arrived about the same time as Dinky, who is very small.
Durrant relates Kinky’s story with great expression as if telling a children’s tale. Presumably, she has had a great deal of experience in storytelling, as the mother of five sons, now older men.
‘‘He was just young, and he was buried in the sand, with just his head out, on a day when the waves were very strong, and a seagull pecked him on the head, wanting to eat him.
‘‘But he was seen in time, and somebody brought him in, so he’s quite brain-damaged and, though he looks all right, he takes three steps forward and five steps backward, which means, if you are trying to climb the cliff, you are going to fall down.’’
After a pause, she adds, ‘‘But he really loves his swim.’’
Durrant is carrying on a tradition dating back 50 years at Campbells Bay. She started more than 30 years ago, but local character Leila McNamara had been swimming penguins for 20 years before that.
When the penguins have had enough, they waddle out. The three youngest finish first, as, without waterproofing, they get cold. They huddle together in a large cardboard box.
Two more penguins toddle out of the water and, while Durrant and Standish pack up, the final swimmer notices and emerges to join them.
Durrant and Standish pick up the bin and box, and they’re off, without any farewell.
They are no-nonsense characters – focused on what is important to them, caring for birds.
When I call Durrant, there is no time to chat. ‘‘Yes?’’ We make time for an interview. ‘‘You’re on the whiteboard,’’ she says and hangs up.
Walking inside Durrant’s twobedroom brick-and-tile duplex in suburban Rothesay Bay is disconcerting.
Visually, it’s a classic twobedroom brick-and-tile ‘‘granny flat’’, with a framed giant jigsaw of Clydesdales, and hand-coloured photographs of two granddaughters, now mothers themselves.
The sounds and smells are those of a remote offshore island. There’s a distinctive whiff of guano and the constant low chirping of a baby kingfisher coming from the spare bedroom – the nursery.
‘‘He can hear his mum’s voice, and he’s saying, ‘where’s my dinner’?’’ Durrant says.
She sits down in a grey velour armchair to answer questions.
Her answers are to the point. She was a ward of the state and grew up in foster care, in a large home in Auckland, with three siblings and a few other children.
Is there any link between that and the way she provides foster care for birds?
‘‘No,’’ she says.
‘‘Yes,’’ says Standish later, when I ask her about the challenges Durrant faces.
I am thinking about the fact Durrant gets by on donations and, when they run low, digs into her pension.
‘‘I don’t think she looks on anything as a challenge,’’ Standish says.
‘‘She puts it down to the fact that she was in foster care as a child. You just had to get on and do. Whatever it was, you just had to get on and do it.’’
As for why she does it; she doesn’t do it for the honours, which include a Queen’s Service Medal, as well as community awards; she loves it, and she’s good at it.
‘‘She enjoys seeing little creatures become self-sufficient and going back to the wild where they belong.’’
Durrant’s version: ‘‘It’s very fulfilling. It’s busy, and I’m never bored.’’
It started after her husband, a teacher, fell off a ladder and broke his back.
Once he was up, Durrant needed something to do. She answered an advertisement for feeding birds, got to know the other bird rescue people, including Auckland’s other Bird Lady, Lyn Macdonald in West Auckland, and it grew from there.
Plus, it uses her nursing skills from her earlier career.
Durrant left the foster home at 16 to go nursing, mainly because Green Lane Hospital provided accommodation.
Later, when she was married, Durrant worked for many years at the Wilson Home, near Takapuna. The family lived opposite the state school for severely disabled children.
‘‘It gave me the most useful skills you can imagine,’’ she says.
Those abilities include making splints, cleaning wounds, stitching birds up, bandaging them, and figuring out inventive ways to support the ones with disabilities.
The phone runs hot with callers wanting advice and Durrant has helped people from as far afield as China, Hungary and the UK.
Plus, people arrive at all hours, bringing unwell birds. Around 4000 sick and injured birds come through Durrant’s home every year.
Cats are responsible for around half the injured baby birds brought in. Durrant is adamant they can be controlled and must be.
‘‘It’s important: New Zealand has only got native birds as our speciality.’’
Hundreds of volunteers help her, with a roster operating over the busy period, spring and summer.
They help with cleaning and feeding.
They are strictly told not to talk to or pet the birds, which must return to the wild.
This week, the baby kingfisher’s companions in the nursery are a wood pigeon and common barbary pigeon.
As Durrant squeezes pureed food into their tiny mouths with a syringe, she explains she takes all types of birds, not just natives.
It has caused trouble with officials, but her argument is people can’t tell the difference between a baby tui, for example, and a blackbird. So, if she only took natives, many wouldn’t reach her.
‘‘I take everything, and they get looked after.’’
Plus, if people care enough to bring a bird to her, she honours that.
‘‘Even if it’s a sparrow, I keep the faith.’’
The laundry is now the ‘‘tough love’’ room, where baby birds no longer get hand fed. They are put in a cage with birds that are already feeding themselves and have to get hungry enough to try it themselves.
‘‘It’s what happens in the wild. The mother puts the food on the ground near the babies,’’ Durrant explains.
Outside, a tarpaulin covers a narrow yard, which is filled with larger cages.
There’s a morepork with a black eye after he crashed into a sensor light while chasing moths, another juvenile morepork, five wood pigeons, two tui, a blackbird, a magpie, the two kingfishers, and many penguins.
Durrant lifts the lid on a large, long box and there are some familiar little blue penguins.
They have been swimming all morning, taking turns in a plastic basin. Bernie’s having a rest and so is little Dinky.
There’s one unmistakable bird, twirling around frenetically and walking backwards.
‘‘It’s Kinky,’’ I say.
He does a spin.
The Bird Lady closes the lid firmly and waves us off. And so, we are released back into the wilds of suburban North Shore.