Down on the farm

Paradise shelducks are special birds, endemic to Aotearoa, but this one was a heart-stealer too.

The love of a good duck

Putangitangi don't naturally occur anywhere else in the world. They live all over the country and have continued to do well despite being included as a game bird during duck shooting season. Many farmers don't like them because some areas attract very large flocks of birds and as most waterfowl do, they foul a lot of grass while they're standing around on it.

On our farm we have half a dozen pairs which nest in the same places each year. It's hard to keep track of which bird is which, so it's impossible to confirm whether the pairs are both the same birds every year since they will apparently find a new mate if one dies.

When they occur in small numbers they're quite unobtrusive. It's often not until I begin to notice a lone male sitting quietly out in a paddock that I realise it's nesting season again and he's waiting for his partner who's probably laying an egg. Once she begins the 35-day incubation period, he'll do a lot of sitting around waiting for her, often at some distance, until she comes off to eat and drink.

I've only ever discovered one ground nest with the remains of egg shells and down, in a depression under an old log. Most birds here nest high in the puriri trees, in the midst of large epiphytic lily plants.

I lived here for several years before I ever saw a putangitangi chick. The chicks are terribly fast movers and if there's water nearby they'll dash for its cover when they're startled, diving down and staying under water for minutes at a time, until the chance of immediate danger might have passed. While the chicks hide, their parents distract any would-be predator, leading them away by dragging one wing on the ground as if injured and easy to catch.

My first close contact with putangitangi chicks was at the tail end of a spring storm. When checking my sheep I discovered a tiny, striped, fuzzy chick following a ewe and her lambs around, happily chirruping its constantly noisy chatter. I picked it up and took it back to the area under a nearby huge puriri where I had earlier concluded there was a nest. I spotted another chick, swirling around on the other side of the flooded stream, responding at once to my movement and the chatter of its sibling. It scooted across the stream and up into the paddock but there was no sign of the rest of the family.

I tried to leave them there, hoping their parents would come back for them, but they wouldn't leave me! No matter how fast I tried to get away, they were just as quick and followed me along the track, around the house, through the back door... and stayed.

They turned out to have been from a clutch of at least eight. We saw six of their siblings a few days later, further across the flats on a large flood-remnant puddle.

The chicks spent their first two weeks inside our house, as we shuffled around trying not to stand on them. Then we moved them outside - their excrement deposits having grown along with them - and hired a carpet cleaning machine. We watched them grow from cute fluffy bobbles into young adults, one of each sex.

By nine weeks they were fully feathered, with only tiny tufts of down still on their heads. Both birds regularly stretched their glorious wings, flapping about the place, and I kept waiting for them to accidentally fall off the ground and discover flight.

At around ten weeks the rest of their family (with only four youngsters left) were already flying around the flats but our two had only briefly left the ground when exercising their wings and I wondered if they were heavier than they'd be in the wild, having constant access to a rich diet. They also had no other family to encourage them into the sky.

During the eleventh week the female bird's head changed colour very quickly, white feathers growing in by the day making her look very untidy for a while.

At the end of Week 11 they had both begun to fly and once they were up, there was no stopping them. Whenever I walked out on the farm, they'd come and fly around me in circles. They were fantastic!

One of the entertaining things about young putangitangi learning to fly - and I've seen this many times in both wild and hand-reared birds - is that when they're first in the air they try all sorts of flips and almost-rolls. If you see a putangitangi flipping almost upside-down when in flight, you can be sure it's a youngster just recently on the wing.

At the beginning of March, when they were nearly five and a half months old, they flew away.

Then one afternoon at the end of June (in the middle of duck-shooting season) we were approached by a female

putangitangi. When I offered her some food, she let me pick her up. Our Ms Duck was home!

So began the second part of our relationship with this extraordinary bird, during which she developed particular habits around ours. She would come out on the farm with us wherever we went, waiting for us to get a bit ahead, then flying to catch up, or walking with us for long distances. She became adept at landing on fence posts and eventually at flying in windows in the shed. She would greet us in the morning in our bedroom with a muddy, wet shake of her feathers. She slept on the roof and we called to her as we retired each night. She spent long hours sitting in the living room with us (we gave up and opted for a painted floor for just this sort of reason) either beside one of our feet, or on a lap. She was rather like a cross between a cat and a flying farm dog. She seemed to have fallen in love with Stephan and courted him constantly, to our great amusement.

When we were installing flashings on a new bit of the building, Stephan had to shift her aside every time he wanted to hammer in the next nail. She'd find him in the shed where he was turning wood and fly up on to the bench to be next to him.

She did lambing beats with me, stood on the backs of the sheep before they were shorn, and the cattle all became accustomed to her flapping in to stand on the posts of the yards while we were working.

She left for the annual moult toward the end of December and returned at the end of January. Our next few months were charmingly filled by our feathered friend.

But then came one terrible day, when a visitor who'd been told by all her other farm-stay hosts that 'the ducks will get out of the way', drove over the top of Ms Duck. I held her as she died; there was nothing we could do.

We were beside ourselves with grief and had to ask our visitor, who had been staying with us for a while, to leave the next day. She didn't appear to understand and the hole in our hearts felt big enough to consume everything. It was a terrible time.

We subsequently provided a home for three other female birds similarly raised by people. In all cases the intense connection the birds formed with their humans had become dangerous to the birds or problematic for the people. They're very noisy creatures and when attached to humans they have no vehicle sense at all so rearing lost chicks in builtup areas appears to be unwise.

If you are someone who could not let such a bird fly free into the dangerous world of duck-shooting and living in the wild, it's best to walk away from any lost chick and hope its parents find it. One bird we re-homed, despite my strong warning against doing so when asked, had her wing feathers clipped to stop her flying during the hunting season. Unlike domestic ducks, putangitangi wing feathers only grow during the moult in summer. Because of that she was unable to fly away to moult with the rest of her kind and became a complete social misfit, never able to return to the wild and too fiercely territorial to be part of a human environment.

There is now a great deal more information available online than there was when we reared Ms Duck and her brother. I found very little about them anywhere, beyond basic breeding season times and descriptions. It was a real privilege to have such close contact with them and to document their development in a way which has informed my ongoing observation of the species where they live around me.

But more than that, it was an incredibly special time spent with a creature who freely chose to be with us when her real home was in the skies. n

She seemed to have fallen in love with Stephan and courted him constantly, to our great amusement.