In my suburban South-East Auckland upbringing, birds unique to Aotearoa lived in non-fiction books. If there were birds on the playground, they were seagulls. Three-and-a-half kilometres, as the gull flies, between my primary school and the nearest beach. 

The land had been farmland until suburban sprawl needed to extend and stretch further. Once, it was kauri and rimu forests; the damage was done long before developers bought up pastureland by the hectare and built brick and tile homes with terracotta roofs. The trees on my street and in our backyard were saplings. It’s hard to imagine birds nesting in a tree barely taller than my eight-year-old self with my arms stretched up into the sky. 

It was the nineties, and young enquiring minds didn’t yet have Wikipedia and the rest of the fact-focused internet at our disposal. Encarta may have had an excellent maze-based trivia game, but it was light on information about all things Aotearoa. When it came time to do a school project on a bird, my kākāpō research drew from Gerard Hutching’s The Natural World Of New Zealand, which was one of my favourite books on the shelf at home. I loved everything I learned about these strange birds: the particular green of their feathers, their nocturnal habits, their booming communication. I don’t think their rarity fully registered to me then – to me, all New Zealand birds in the book were mysterious treasures that I hadn’t yet had the privilege to see. Kākāpō, kererū, kōkako – all seemed equally remote and unlikely. 

The exception was godwits. 

We lived out east. My grandparents, however, were from the west. Driving to see them meant driving over the SH 16 causeway between Point Chevalier and Avondale, past the shell bank that various migratory birds call home… for part of the year. If we were in the car with Nana, and it was the right season, we would get a wistful chat and explanation about the birds and where they were flying in from or heading off to. Alaska! They were flying all the way to Alaska! Could you imagine? 

I could imagine. One of our semi-regular whānau day trips – with or without the grandparents – was to Pūkorokoro. Again, this being the nineties, Ngāti Pāoa’s grievance at the renaming of this kāinga hadn’t yet been taken on by the people with gazetting power, and to my childhood knowledge, it was Miranda. We would stop for fish and chips in Kaiaua on the way and I would always request a doughnut. If I was lucky I would get one, and lick cinnamon sugar from my fingers as we looked out over the water past the mussel farms and towards Thames. 

The godwits lived here, too. A special seaside sanctuary on one side of the road, an information centre on the other – the Shorebird Centre. I’ve never met a diorama or educational poster unworthy of viewing, even the sorts set up by organisations operating on fumes, and I happily spent time reading about the birds of the area, looking at displays and trying unsuccessfully to convince my parents that I needed a t-shirt with a wrybill on the front. 

Here, it wouldn’t have mattered if the trees were younger than I was. These birds didn’t need canopies or undergrowth – they had their own special environment that seemed far from bird-friendly. But who was I to judge what was bird-friendly and what wasn’t? 

After all, my only bird sightings close to home were the gulls, so birds and the ocean should have been synonymous in my mind. And my most infamous bird-related moment as a toddler was demonstrating to a group of tourists at Auckland Museum how a moa would have walked, so I wasn’t unfamiliar with the concept of birds looking different from your run of the mill sparrow. And yet, despite this context, despite my soaking up information bit by bit, I didn’t have a full appreciation for the shorebirds. There was some kind of disconnect; maybe it’s because they were already real to me. 

Every time we made the trip, I would gaze at the bunk rooms and imagine what it would be like to be able to go on an overnight adventure into nature. We had a tent at home, canvas and metal, but it only ever ended up pitched in our backyard. Holidays were spent with family members or in motels and cabins. The natural world was for daytime adventures, with civilization, however modest, beckoning to us at night. 

The people in the bunk rooms, I decided, must be doing important things. There were gumboots and tramping boots outside the door, which seemed like indicators of action of some sort. Whatever it was, it had to do with the birds, and the sea, and the shore, and that was good enough for me. One day, that would be me. 

But it isn’t. I’m writing about memories from twenty years ago, instead of having something more recent to reflect on. My sister is the one who hitched her cart to the environmental space, and she’s who I have text conversations with about sightings of invasive species, after witnessing her joining forces to capture a rainbow skink spotted in her backyard. There’s a rainbow connection with invasive species in Aotearoa; there are rainbow lorikeets on my street, I tell her. Should I tell MPI? 

It’s not only the villainous rainbow lorikeets in my neighbourhood, though. I live in a leafy central suburb now, but it’s certainly a case of the worst house on the best street. There are sparrows and blackbirds and mynahs, but the appearances from locals are what keep my eyes on the trees in the backyard shared by our whole block of units. In the overgrown bush outside my ranch slider, I see tūī at least twice a week. Sometimes pīwakawaka; once or twice, a tauhou. I’d like to think that I would still be as enthralled by them if they’d been around me, tufts and angry eyebrows, when I was a child, that the novelty wouldn’t have worn off. 

They sing and they swoop and sometimes, when I’m leaving the house to meander around the streets for a lockdown stroll, I stand underneath the imposing tōtara by the letterboxes and watch, listen, breathe. Rationally, I know that their song only seems more present during these strange times because I’m home to hear it… but it still feels like a little gift, a reason to step out the door and into the world to walk past the same fences and houses, the same parked cars, look up at the same maunga at the end of my road. The tūī song gives each walk a new shape and dimension.  

The trees around my childhood home must be much, much taller now. Whether they are endemic, whether they are sturdy enough to support ecosystems that were scrubbed away, I don’t know. Do today’s kids at my primary school see tūī in the treetops? Do they take them for granted or do they marvel at them like I do? I hear them outside, and it’s a balm. I wait for the levels and the seasons to change, so that I can cross the boundary into Waikato and see the godwits as they settle in for their Southern Hemisphere summer, sharing the Firth of Thames with seagulls. 

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With it being not just Bird of the Year season but Bird of the CENTURY right now – and the whole to-do with the John Oliver bit – I thought I’d track down this piece that was shortlisted (but didn’t quite make the prizes) for a competition a couple of years back. Ta-da. – BL