Bird nerd Colin Miskelly

Bird nerd

As a school kid, Colin Miskelly saw a poster featuring takahe¯ , black robin and ka¯ ka¯ po¯ and the headline Wanted:

Alive. He wondered if he’d ever see the critically endangered species in his lifetime, or if they’d become extinct.

Some years later, he took a bottle of port to the summit of Rangatira Island on the Chathams to celebrate his 21st birthday, watching the sunset, alone. The rest of Don Merton’s pioneering black robin conservation team had left the island that morning for Christmas. As the robin chicks they’d fostered out to tomtits found their wings, he gave them names. There was Bonus – the extra chick that appeared from nowhere; Phoenix – who survived in spite of a cracked egg; and Rosie – after his then girlfriend – who turned out to be a super-breeder. The bird, that is.

In that single breeding season, 1983-84, the black robin population doubled from nine to 18, launching an era of world-leading bird recovery programmes for New Zealand and a lifetime of bird research and conservation for Miskelly.

For other birds it was already too late. Miskelly unlocks a wooden cabinet in the basement of Te Papa’s Wellington storage facility, where he works as a curator.

Glassy eyes stare out above the unmistakeable curve of a huia beak. Miskelly doesn’t reckon we’ll be able to bring back extinct birds any time soon, given the added complication of trying to implant an egg rather than an embryo. But he’s seen the charismatic personality of their nearest relatives, the ko¯ kako and saddleback. Add that to the sleek black plumage and bright orange wattle – it would be hard to find a better candidate for deextinction.

‘‘I don’t think it will happen in our lifetime. But if you could create a huia, wouldn’t that be marvellous?’’

In the specimen cabinets, snipe skins are stretched over sculpted cigar forms. Shiny, velvety and smelling of camphor, it’s hard not to reach out and pat them. But they have sad stories, too. The two snipe the wildlife service rescued before a 1963 rat invasion wiped out the Taukihepa/Big South Cape island population. They died in the aviary but were later discovered to both be male.

The next is one of Miskelly’s – a Campbell Island snipe from his 2006 trip. It hurt its wing in his research net. It was traumatic – his first injury in thousands of snipe-handlings. How far we’ve come from the days of an assigned curatorial shotgun for collecting specimens.

As a curator, he says, you have to learn all the scientific names. ‘‘I was enough of a bird nerd before I started here that it didn’t take much,’’ he laughs.

Meet Colin Miskelly, 55 – snipeologist, former Department of Conservation (DOC) science adviser, Te Papa curator, founder of bird identification website nzbirdsonline, identifier of Happy Feet. General bird nerd.

Miskelly was 13 when he joined the Ornithological Society. His father was a mechanical engineer and his mother a nurse, but his grandfather had been a keen natural historian. Colin was always fascinated by wildlife and Gregg’s jelly swap cards helped shift that focus from African big game animals to New Zealand birds.

At 15, he spent six weeks on the Chathams, celebrating his 16th birthday volunteering with a taiko petrel expedition – a phantom bird that had just been rediscovered after 120 years.

It’s partly about the thrill of seeing a rare bird – he tailors holiday itineraries around viewing possibilities – but also of learning how they behave, their history and the history of human interactions with them.

Miskelly’s wedding band conveys the extent of his passion/obsession. It’s inlaid with the footprints of the secretive snipe that have occupied much of his research time. They’re an exact scaled-down replica of the muddy feet that tracked across his field notebook in 1986.

As much as anything else, it was the lure of remote, fascinating places that drew him to study snipe.

He spent six summers on the Snares Islands, observing, recording their calls, herding them carefully into his hand nets. Four people on an island 100km southwest of Stewart Island, for three months. They baked bread on the temperamental old range, scabbed crayfish scraps and the odd fresh vegetable from fishing trawlers, and – remarkably – managed to stay sane.

Miskelly regrets a little destroying a beguiling old myth through his research. Muttonbirders used to tell of the mysterious hakawai – a bird whose call on clear moonlit nights was followed by a roar like an anchor chain dropping into a boat.

He showed the haunting sound was in fact a snipe aerial display – the roar is made with the tail feathers. He matched the calls with sonograms and found the snipe tail feathers bore tell-tale damage to their tips.

From there, he got a job as a science adviser with DOC on the West Coast and later in Wellington, where he stayed for 18 years. It was the early days of pest eradication and DOC was looking to clear Ka¯ piti Island of rats. Miskelly helped design the drop of poison brodifacoum, which had not yet been tested on species like kiwi, ka¯ ka¯ and robin. They knew all eyes would be on them, and they couldn’t afford to get it wrong.

Since then, New Zealand has become a world-leader at pest eradication. Miskelly is cautious, though, about the Predator Free 2050 campaign.

‘‘I don’t know that the date is achievable, but when you think what’s been achieved in my lifetime . . . I first visited Little Barrier Island as a 14-year-old on a five-day trip. The Wildlife Service were attempting to eradicate cats. At the time, it was an absolute pipe dream to get rats off there. We just thought there was no way you could ever do it, yet within 20 years it had been achieved.’’

One of the biggest barriers will be people, as eradication will probably require publicly unpalatable tools such as genetic modification. There’s also a risk of mouse population explosions, as their competitors and predators are removed.

Back in the Te Papa basement, Miskelly pulls out trays of albatrosses – sad closed-wing specimens that give no clue of their soaring wingspan. They used to come in as beach wrecks and fishing by-catch but 1990s efforts reduced the impact of Kiwi fleets. Now they face a different threat.

‘‘Asian fishing fleet crews are so starving we think they’re deliberately catching albatross to eat, just to survive. This is probably the greatest threat to New Zealand albatross.’’

Miskelly is generally optimistic about New Zealand birds. They’re beloved – they’re on our banknotes and postage stamps and part of the way we see ourselves.

But new threats loom. Climate change could threaten rock wrens, as stoats will be able to venture higher into their alpine territory. For other birds, coastal and river developments are destroying their habitat.

In 40 years of birding, Miskelly has seen every living endemic New Zealand bird and been to islands so remote they take weeks to reach. He’s named a species (the Perseverance snipe) and been the first human to see a Campbell Island snipe nest.

But one bird he identified sent his face around the world – Happy Feet. When someone reported an emperor penguin sighting on the Ka¯ piti Coast, DOC called Miskelly. He’d spent a season as a guide with a tour company in Antarctica, camping with emperors.

‘‘From about 100m away through my binoculars I knew it was an emperor. That was mind-boggling. Even a king penguin, which is the other option, would have been pretty remarkable in the North Island. But that was pretty exciting. And then the gradual dawning of just what this would mean.’’

Miskelly was opposed to returning it to Antarctica.

But he’s diplomatic about what he thinks happened when Happy Feet was released, never to be heard from again. ‘‘I think the transmitter fell off.’’

‘‘Asian fishing fleet crews are so starving we think they’re deliberately catching albatross to eat, just to survive.’’