Skip to main content

The Turnstone



There is this bird, beautifully patterned,
black and white, and brown,
a small bird, smaller than a thrush or blackbird
that breeds on the Arctic tundra
and then  flies here to New Zealand every spring.
  
and here am I, just
turning over stones.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tunnel-web spiders and golden hunting wasps

My wildlife experiences these days are pretty much confined to my backyard and a daily ramble around the village of Greytown, New Zealand.  During my daily walks, it is the birds which attract my attention:  skylarks, (“Hail to thee, blithe spirit”), goldfinches, (“gaillard he was as a goldfynch in the shawe”),  black birds, (“shouting all day at nothing in leafy dells alone”), the song thrush, greenfinch, chaffinch, dunnock, california quail, house sparrow, eastern rosella, Australian magpie, starling, yellowhammer –foreigners all. Most of them were introduced in the nineteenth century as bio-agents to control plagues of insects brought about by the wholesale destruction of the bush and the consequential severe disruption of the eco-system. I welcome them all, knowing that in the not too distant future we may be lucky to see any bird at all.  I do see the odd native bird; kotare, the kingfisher, pipiwharauroa, the shining cuckoo and its dupe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Murder of Rooks

From Southland to Northland, Regional Councils around the country are once again putting out the call for sightings of rooks, Corvis frugilegus, in their efforts to exterminate them. The rook is a minor agricultural pest, on a par with the yellowhammer, so how did this bird become a target for extermination rather than control? How did this bird become an unwanted organism under the Biosecurity Act? The rook is a black, hoarse–voiced bird about the size of a magpie which was brought to New Zealand from Britain between 1862 and 1874 to help control agricultural pests. Unlike many other European birds introduced at the same time, rooks spread very slowly at first. Even as late as 1970, they were largely confined to parts of the Hawke’s Bay, Manawatu, southern Wairarapa and Canterbury. In the 1971 rooks were declared an agricultural pest in the Hawke’s Bay, largely because of the damage done to emerging crops.  Something like 35,000 thousand were shot, probably ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Credo

High summer and everything is intent upon breeding and increasing their numbers. Bugs everywhere! The "summer" flies are intent upon taking the food before it reaches my mouth.  The Mason wasps, mud daubers, are loudly building their nests, not only under chairs but also in the folds of the drapes, while spiders threaten to totally envelop the cottage with their webs. In the evening, if I dare to leave the windows open, I am bombarded by moths and click beetles and bugged by Huhu beetles.  Raucous cicadas rudely awaken me in the morning while white butterfly caterpillars chomp their way through the cabbages. But then there are the gorgeous and the exotic creatures which stop me in my tracks and dissipate any hostility towards the pestiferous.  They send me off to the books to try and make an identification. Gorgeous steely blue lady birds which I can always find in the lime tree. A tiny native bee in the hay paddocks which I have yet to identify and a strange creature I a...
Post a Comment
Read more