When korimako – bellbirds – are young, they learn to sing. They mimic the birds around then, stringing together strange combinations of burbling calls and whistles, disjointed melodies, until they come into their adult voice.
In December and January, I was at nearly opposite ends of the country. December I spent on the Poor Knights Islands, working with Fairy prions for my PhD research. January I tripped to the subantarctic islands, working with Heritage Expeditions.
On the Poor Knights Islands, and on the Auckland Islands, there are korimako. They’re one of my favourite forest birds, so neat and a beautiful jewel-green, underrated compared to boisterous iridescent tūī. Their song is something else. Seeing them in both places – one a near sub-tropical ecosystem, one subantarctic – is testament to their adaptability as a species. Interestingly, despite their being tūī nearby on the mainland, there are no resident tūī on the Poor Knights islands. There are tūī on the Auckland islands.
On the Poor Knights I was working through the night, and the relief that the first few notes of korimako song bring after a night of howling rako (Buller’s shearwaters) was like a weight off my chest, a vice-grip unwrapped from my brain. Every morning we’d mark the time of the first notes – 5:15am, 5:19am, and one memorable 4:15am start which meant an extra hour of overlap with the seabirds, a strange in-between time as their song swells and the sky slowly lightens. During the day youngsters would hop around our camp, bumbling and burbling, mimicking our whistles and trying to find their song.
Wandering through the rata forest on Enderby island, we were surrounded by at least fifty curious little korimako, hopping and warbling, learning their own songs. The dialects are different in different places – something true of many of our songbirds. But that searching for song was so beautifully similar, the same weird cracks in the melody, whoops and whistles.
We have so many varied ecosystems in Aotearoa. Finding these little similarities, these connections between disparate places, reminds me that it’s all part of my home. It’s a simple joy in watching the patterns of life in wild places, so similar and so far apart.
