It’s gone eleven at night, and still. The ocean is a gentle hush against the cliffs below, echoing in the narrow inlet. The sky is clear, velvet dark, moonless, starfull. The bright band of the Milky Way is a column rising out of the inky black sea, arcing overhead in a broad glimmering curve. It’s shot through with fleeting shadows, urgent on the wing. The bulk of Tawhiti Rahi is at my back, ramparts of rock rising to the plateau, and falling away into the ocean beneath my feet. I’m balanced right on the edge of everything, with no light but the flaming stars above, the faint wink of the Mokohinau lighthouse, and a ruddy glow from the mainland in the distance.
It is calm, but not quiet. The forest behind me is full of cackles and screams, mournful croons and howls, caterwauling shearwaters, raucous rako. On dusk, they returned in their thousands. A dark tide in from the ocean, swirling through the sky to plunge fearless through a tangled canopy. Crashing, wailing, screaming. All of it part of the normal rhythm of a seabird island. The korimako go silent, their songs fading into the evening, and the rako return, silent on the wing. It’s an eerie in-between time, the liminal space between day and night, the calm before the storm. For me, dusk marks the start of my working hours. Once the birds land, the ruckus begins. It’s February, so beneath the earth are thousands of fluffy shearwater chicks tucked in their burrows, waiting for a feed. As soon as the first bird hits the ground a plaintive ‘sweeee-sweeeee-sweeeee’ wavers out from the burrow entrances. We’re hungry! We’re growing! We need food!
Their parents return from startling distances to feed them. Foraging trips can last between a day and two weeks, some tracking up to 2000 kilometres away across the ocean before returning the same distance with rich, oily sustenance – krill, fish and squid processed and refined into an energy-dense slurry – that the chicks convert into fat and fluff and eventually, proper feathers. How they know where to go is mysterious to us, who stare out at a seemingly featureless oceanscape. The pelagic realm can seem barren, but not to the eyes and nose of a shearwater. I watch as they skim overhead, stiff-winged and graceful, mere shadows against the dark sky. Effortless, their gliding wings eat distances unimaginable to us. And they rise from the sea surface to circle the cliffs, soaring like the kāhu that patrol during daylight hours.
I have so many images in my mind of seabirds going about their lives in this dark world. Wandering their colonies at night with a dim red headlamp is an intimate view into their life. A snapshot of these patterns of existence that go on in our absence, tracking out from remote islands to even more remote places where we can’t follow. These are the invisible birds. You won’t find them in any ecosanctuary, on display for the public. They cannot be captive, because to deny them the ocean is to deny them part of their being. These are the forgotten birds. How do we bring them back to the mainland? They’re starting to return on their own. How do we introduce them to people who have never known them? How can we share the wonders of their lives?
Winking in the distance, the Mokohinau light draws me back in time, to that island and the beginnings of this question that has embedded itself in my life. In my mind I stand on another cliff edge, years past, under the same star-shot black sky. The howling and screaming of a different seabird island is in my ears, new to me then, an undercurrent of purring diving petrels, the whistle-wick of ōi, the wild laugh of pakahā. The Mokohinau lighthouse swings great arms of light across the islands and out over the water. The sea below is wilder, a white-noise thrash through a narrow chasm. In the distance, the bobbing headlamps of the rest of the team are across that chasm and tracking back to the lighthouse. Matt and I douse our lights and lift our voices in a wild whoop to the night and the cliffs respond, the noise swelling, ringing and resounding with thousands of layers of seabird song. We’re standing on a thin tongue of rock over the sea, feeling the vibrations of an island full of nocturnal life. The rock beneath our feet is just a shadow, the chasm a deeper shadow. I feel like I’m standing on nothing, suspended in the dark. On the very edge of the Hauraki Gulf, surrounded by water and sky. The stars tremble through salt-laden air, rimey mist stirred up from the waves below. There are racing shadows slicing through the sky, trailing croons and cackles as they lift up from the ocean and skim the clifftops. The subtlety and swiftness of this nocturnal life is right on the limits of what we can perceive.
“It’s frustrating.”
“What is?”
“Knowing that there’s absolutely no way of photographing this.” As I say the words, I know I’ll spend the next however long trying to prove myself wrong. Years maybe.
Now my eyes are pressed against the darkness. Trying to pick out the trajectories of shearwaters against a night sky when they’re nothing but a darker glimpse of wings against the stars is proving a challenge. I’ve spent the past hour aligning everything perfectly, the broad sweep of the Milky Way up the centre of a vertical frame. My tripod is balanced on the rock, legs splayed and braced on tiny crevices. I’ve tied one down with harakeke, braiding a leaf-strap out of the frame and into a second support for my camera in this precarious clifftop perch. Self-timer, 1 second. Removes the shake of my hand pressing the shutter release. Exposure time, 10 seconds. Long enough to catch the distant fire of the stars, but not so long that the rotation of the earth drags them across the sky. A gentle press, pause, and then click. In my right hand, high above my head and offset, is a slowly dying flash. In the corner of my vision is the suggestion of a shadow. An even count, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash. Like a heartbeat. As soon as the first puff of light hits the darkness I know this won’t be the one. The line is wrong, cutting across the trail of stars it should be following. But I’m patient. It will happen eventually, or it won’t. The shutter clicks closed, but I don’t bother with the LCD preview. My head is in the stars, shadow-searching.
Telling the stories of seabirds is a twofold goal for me. Partly, it’s scientific in nature as I study their health and behaviours, looking for patterns of change over years and gaining new insight into the lives of birds that have been nearly ignored for so long. The other half of it is illustrative. I want to transfer these experiences I feel so lucky to have into a medium that lets others appreciate that same wonder without jumping through logistical hoops. The whole mainland would have been like this once, ringing with nocturnal noise until we arrived and ruined so much. Both of those reasons are why I am clinging to a cliff edge on a moonless night, shooting at stars. The night is dark and full of intentions. Parents must feed their chicks. The wildness of their howling calls runs deep in my veins now, a rushing riverine thrill that never leaves me. Another flicker at the edge of my eye. Press, pause, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash. Click. And again. And again. And again. Until the stars align – or rather – the shearwaters align with the stars, bound for the ocean once more after a brief stop in the close dark of a warm burrow, offloading energy to a rapidly growing pom-pom that will one day follow that same pattern, trace those same migration paths across the Pacific, loop around Hawai’i and return to ply the waters of Aotearoa to raise their own chicks. Year after year. An endless cycle.
I try to make sense of the parts I can, and to share my wonder with others. I’m content in the knowledge, though, that there is much I will never understand, never be able to experience in the way that they do; the way they see in the dark, and find their flight-lines across the ocean. There will always be mysteries, and that’s as much a part of the story as the parts that we can understand. I itch to shake off my skin, stretch my wings wide and launch with luminous eyes into the starry, infinite night. Instead I disengage my camera from the tripod, pack the legs down and sit on the rock, staring out into the dark. My bones feel heavy, solid, but my mind is buoyed by silken feathers and my ears are full of ringing screams. The nightsong of the Poor Knights is wrapped around me, lifting me out into the glittering sky.
