Congratulations to top bird kereru¯

There can be little doubt in the south the kereru¯ was a deserved winner of the top bird title. Those lovely big, floppy, swoopy white-breasted birds, lolling up in ko¯ whai trees bring gardens to life. And they are everywhere, as Southland writer Lynley Dear tells NZ Listener readers this week.

She talked of her own pad in bush-clad Otatara, and of the nearby road signs reading ‘‘Caution: Kereru¯ ’’ – correcting an earlier impression in the magazine that such signs feature only, and then recently, in Wellington.

She writes of being ‘‘entertained daily by kereru¯ with their bellows-pump wing beat, their climbing, stalling, swooping display flights, and the splendid white glow of those spinnaker breasts’’.

I am so with her in appreciating these birds. As beautiful big, cabbagey roses – known as Heritage Roses now – with their endearing perfumes leave modern standard-bred roses for dead, so kereru¯ in flight, style, floppy weight fulness, and a certain panache make the takahe¯ , ka¯ ka¯ po¯ , even our dear kiwi look drab and dowdy.

I know style is not everything, but when public votes are being counted, style certainly counts.

Years ago, a generous hospitable neighbour, whose Ma¯ ori heritage gave him access to traditional foods, shared with us toheroa and then mutton-birds.

He invited us the following weekend for more and I said thanks, but haven’t we enjoyed our full share of the muttonbirds? Nah, he said, this time it is kereru¯ . I am doing a ha¯ ngı¯.

We didn’t know what it was and went along to a feast of root vegetables cooked in the earth and something that, from

memory, tasted like chicken, which everything you can’t identify does.

Ages later we realised it was what we called wood pigeon.

More time passed and one night we heard a huge bang. But nothing followed, so we went to bed.

I woke in the night to tinkling glass and thought Molls, our big ginger cat, was prowling along book cases so sighed back to sleep.

In the morning Himself said: don’t look in the spare bedroom. I looked and saw a big kereru¯ perched on a beam high up and saw he had taken out the big fixed pane of glass in the centre of the window frame.

Himself eventually ‘‘luxed’’ the bird out after joining all the vacuum cleaner lengths together, standing on a table and waving to the bird, which flew around quite casually before taking off.

Cool, that kereru¯ .