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Bird Life on Island and Shore

XII. Twilight and Dawn

page 127

XII. Twilight and Dawn.

In another volume some description has been given of the several Petrels noted by me on islands immediately north and east of Stewart Island. On them the Mutton bird was comparatively scarce; now, however, fifty or seventy miles farther south, we had reached the main breeding-field of the species. On Kotiwhenu, and on the larger contiguous bit of land Te Puka, they were visible each night in enormous quantities. Readers of ‘Mutton Birds and other Birds’ may recollect an account of the stately sailings of individual birds of this breed over Te Marama, of their long sweeping circles hardly broken by flicker of wing, of their huge aerial loops and coils, albatross-like in sustained evenness of poise. On Kotiwhenu, flicker of wing-tip was comparatively prominent; the points of the primaries controlling speed and direction visibly played the part of brake and rudder. With so prodigious a number of birds page 128 wheeling and circling overhead, collision must have been otherwise almost inevitable.

As on islets visited in 1910 and 1911, the quantity of Petrel attracted landwards varied every night. Their numbers were greatest on perfectly cloudless evenings. With a sky overcast or even cloudy fewer birds appeared. Though darkness was always shrouding the sea before they came, the time of arrival, too, differed slightly from day to day. With waning light parties began to reach the land, to draw inwards to their island. From headlands we could watch them drifting restlessly to and fro in bands and companies low on the water; then as twilight deepened into dusk they would rise higher and higher from the ocean levels, until at last the forerunners of the flight were hawking and wheeling over and around the island. Meantime, even before a single bird had pitched, the island had begun faintly to wail and murmur. From a burrow here and a burrow there, already there had arisen intermittent snatches of strange tuneless chants. Now with the faster fall of Petrels from the sky—much as the congregation of an old-fashioned kirk follows the precentor's lead—bird after bird, pew after pew chimed in, louder and louder the commotion grew. From twos and threes, from dozens, from scores, from hundreds, from thousands, from tens of thousands of burrows, rose an intensifying babel of sound. page 129 By fullest dark, from that lonely island a roar ascended to the sky—a roar like that of water chafing over stones, an unceasing comminglement of sound, hour after hour sustained, seething, simmering, bubbling, the strangest, uncanniest, most unbirdlike epithalamium. Difficult as these Petrel breeding-grounds may be of access, their attainment is worth the certainty of mal de mer, the risk of wreck. There to have been marooned is to have known a new experience.

On my first evening after landing, a lovely starlight night, there must have been hundreds of thousands of birds in the sky. So great, in fact, were their numbers that it seemed impossible there could be available breeding room for all, even though many of the burrows contain side galleries. It may be that the Grey Petrel does not reach maturity until its second year, and that therefore not all the birds seen were mated birds. Above the heights of our own, and even more densely above the highlands of the neighbouring island, they wheeled and circled like swarming bees. As stars play in the rigging of a storm-tossed bark, so they moved to and fro across the pale clear sky, crossing and recrossing each other's line of flight, wheeling and circling in endless gyrations and loops. We could never tire of watching them silently appear and as silently disappear, for, unlike bees filling the air with sound and unlike page 130 the joyous call of Swifts over some grey, old-world cathedral town screaming as they fly, Mutton bird gatherings are perfectly still. There is about them the fascination of speed without effort or apparent driving power. As evening progresses, the more venturesome begin to drop on to the ground through the trees from above, or skimming direct on to the naked sides of the island, reach land on the run, fast flyers sometimes in alighting seeming almost to ricochet along the surface.

These different ways of arrival may perhaps be ascribed to a change in the vegetation of the islands of the south, a change perhaps from a vegetative covering of grasses and sedge only to a later type of growth, one such as now clothes the surface—scrub of fifteen and twenty feet. The method still practised by the majority of Mutton birds is the direct drop; the other—the later mode,—that of alightment about the cliff edges and progression centrewards, is followed by comparatively few. Those constant to what we may believe to be the old fashion, if haply not tangled on the twiggy tops, fall plump and solid with folded pinions. Should, however, a Petrel be caught on the tops—and it happens to scores of birds nightly,—no sign of terror is shown; it rests on the tupari - tops apparently indifferent for minutes together. No mortal astonishment or uneasiness is evinced, even though it may be page 131 arrested with wings outspread or partly spread. Often and often have I listened amazed at the patient indifference of birds thus delayed in descent—a kind of trapping that would instantly drive a land bird wild with terror. The Mutton bird behaves indeed as if all attitudes of rest on land were equally uninviting, as if, lacking the support of the deep sea, all modes of quiescence were indifferently unalluring.

There is nothing, in fact, more extraordinary in the evening fall of birds than their air of dazed bewilderment on land. Having touched ground, whether by direct drop, flutter through tree-tops, or running alightment on naked peat slope, they move at random, purposelessly. For minutes together they will sit alone, motionless, then perhaps in an aimless way shift a few feet, even a few inches, and then again pause. Sometimes in a perfunctory manner a little dilettante scratching will be done; at other times for minutes together they will squat with head leaning towards a burrow—any burrow. In this stupefied condition they can be stroked with the hand. They seem, indeed, hardly in possession of their senses, and, as can be imagined, fall the easiest of prey to the Sea Hawk, who move about among them like butchers amongst penned sheep.

Watching their unconformity, extraneousness, and detachment to their new surroundings, I have page 132 wondered if they can perchance experience something of the feeling of travellers landed at last after long tossing on the sea, when though on solid ground they still in fancy heave and slide. At any rate, for one Petrel that appears to retain its wits, running off with wings raised as if in pursuit of a definite object, hundreds appear dazed, silly, imbecile.

With birds thus congregated in scores about our door—beneath the very floor of our hut,—it soon became possible to disentangle particular vociferations from the general din, to interpret correctly such evil melodies as the supplicatory waitings for regurgitated food, the squally courtships punctuated with scrapings and scratchings, the caterwaulings of preliminary wooing, the tuneless consummation of courtship which happens not on the wing, as might have been anticipated, but more prosaically on the ground.

Except for darkness and the chance of scrub and logs, there is no difficulty in watching Petrel. They are indifferent to the presence of man, their scrapings, singings, and courtships undashed and unabashed by his proximity. It was easy, standing directly above the birds, to watch, in a preoccupied pair, the abject solicitation of the one, the long retention of the coveted food by the other. In this interchange of pabulum the pair have the appearance of wrestling with their bills, page 133 of fencing for position, the one grovelling before the other, as, for instance young Shags coax their stern-eyed parents. The suppliant had doubtless during the previous day guarded the burrow or incubated the egg; the other, the free bird I took it, did not with tyrannical intent withhold the food, but was probably only able to disgorge through the full excitation of certain muscles by solicitation and endearment.

On these southern isles the very number of birds confuse. It is difficult to concentrate on one or one pair; there is too much to listen for and watch. It often happens, moreover, that such concentration is disappointing, that perhaps after an hour's stare the individual from which for some reason or other much is expected dimly disappears into shade of log, or fades into unnoted burrow at the observer's feet. Then again, like no other resting birds, it is not sufficient to mark a specimen to its hole. Amongst Mutton birds that is no certain clue to personality or possession. In the ramifications of a burrow each of the side passages may, and often does, harbour a sitting bird.

The observer is, in fact, bewitched by opportunity. He finds recorded in his brain and notebook vague fragments, unassimilated sights and sounds, rather than exactitudes. Something, however, can be disentangled from this mass of material, page 134 some light shed on the character of the Petrel. Individuals of many species of birds take a kindly interest in the conduct, the motions, the pleasures of their fellows. They are hurt by one another's distresses; they rush to one another's assistance. The most self-engrossed evince at least appreciation, sometimes of a hostile and sometimes of a curious sort, of the presence of others of its race. Perhaps there is hardly a breed where some germ of sociability, some seed of fellow-feeling—let it be merely challenge, avoidance, warning, or fear—cannot be traced. The Mutton bird, I do think, reaches the zero of cold-hearted heathenism towards his race. No interest is shown in each other's affairs, no curiosity. They pass within inches of each other, and neither seems to know. Were it not for the dread of the terrible rending beak one bird would, I verily believe, walk over another. They are as insensible of each other's presence as fallen leaves—as cold. Between the units of these frigid millions there is a great gulf fixed, a barrier unfathomable, impassable as that sundering the quick and the dead. Each pair dwells solitary in a vast gregariousness; each couple lives alone, self-engrossed in the pack. Nor can it be urged in extenuation of such self-concentration that the hundreds of thousands noted each evening are mere loose units or pairs of one immense throng. The wheeling circling multitude page 135 is not a homogeneous horde. It is as dissoluble as any army into divisions, brigades, and battalions. We found, in fact, that the swarm of birds flying nightly over Kotiwhenu and breeding on its peat were composed of companies of varying size. It was an aggregate of almost numberless parties that, great or small, each evening drew towards the land. Though in close proximity, they did not mix, each company preserving its entirety, swinging slowly backwards and forwards low on the water until the proper pitch of darkness had arrived.

That the seemingly homogeneous multitude was indeed made up of a number of tribes and clans was corroborated by the conditions of the burrows. On one headland, or bank, or crown, or indeed locality undistinguishable by any particular outward sign, there might be newly hatched young, on another incubated eggs, on another fresh eggs, on another unoccupied nests, each company, big or little, possessing its strip of territory, its own particular private breeding-ground. We experienced, indeed, in our own proper persons the difference in date of egg-laying by those different communities. An accident having prevented the return of the Dolly at the appointed date, and other food having been consumed, we lived for five days on Mutton-bird eggs and chickweed. These eggs, white like manna on the surface of page 136 the ground and as fresh, we gathered each morning only on certain spots. They had either been inadvertently scraped forth from the shallow side passages of ramified burrows, or been laid on the ground by hens unable to obtain entry to their own proper holes. There may have been, and probably were, on Kotiwhenu alone scores of clans of Mutton birds breeding at periods differing from one another by only a few days. In that great shop there might have been procured “fresh eggs,” “new-laid eggs,” “country eggs,” and “eggs.” Whether therefore feeding in mid-ocean, drawing in at nightfall towards land, or nesting in the peat, the vast seemingly uniform multitude is in truth broken up into communities, companies, bands, and families as pronouncedly as are the millions of a great city, where a man may live for years without knowledge of his neighbour.

Perhaps that affection and friendliness, so absent as regards the race, may elsewhere find expression, may find expression in the mated pairs. Lengthy farewells are at any rate exchanged between one mated Petrel and another. I remember one bird, inadvertently disturbed by me at dawn and purposely thwarted a second time, was still resolute in his determination to return, for a third time he scrambled up the steep slope of his newly vacated burrow. There, unmindful of my presence, page 137 into the dark wet hole he wailed his last, long, lingering adieux.

Evening entertainments on Mutton bird islands vary but little from night to night. With waning daylight the Petrel fall begins, the birds pattering through the leathery tree-tops or falling with a rustle on to—rather than into—spreads of pea-green brake and beds of sedge. This living rain continues most heavily whilst twilight—the longer southern gloaming—still lingers over the dim sea. With deepening darkness it tends to abate, the rain as it were moderating and falling only in showers. The advent of full night is announced by a screaming “te,” “te,” “te,” high-pitched, shrill, and of brief duration, the calling birds of a species we could never discover dashing wildly about just above the tree-tops. Scarcely has it ceased when, distinct from the bubbling, seething, simmering roar of landed birds, fainter and far, and high, high overhead there can be heard a sough or sigh. In its beginning this vast distant suspiration is a little sibilant, but presently takes on a humming vibrant note, as though a steady stream of air were passing through tight-stretched cords. There is a moan as of wind through stiff bare boughs, a going in the branches. We stood expectant of dancing woods, bent boles lashed with the gale, grey blurr of ruffled stiff-necked tupari-tops, a racing sea. Our ears warned us page 138 of the storm about to strike the island woods, and set them swaying, yet moments and then minutes passed. The dew continued to fall, the smoke of our whare fire ascended straight. There arose no puff of ashes from the unswept hearth, no whirlwind stirred the broken bents. The calm of summer night endured. It was a confounding of the senses, “an elfin storm from fairyland,” unfelt, aloof, mysterious. At our feet the leaves lay motionless; above our heads we heard the magic gale that never reached its goal, the rushing mighty wind that varied in tone from a soft swoosh to a more audible blast, as the airs of night caught and kept or carried the sound afar. Twice we were thus deceived; twice we ran out of the hut to note the threatened change of weather. Then what we had heard with our outward ears became part of our island experience; the far-distant, rapid, vibratory hum we learnt to recognise as beating of innumerable wings.

Above these unspoiled isles of the clean unpeopled south the hosts of heaven had come forth to stretch their wings, to sweep and swirl in rapture of untrammelled liberty, to play in their innumerable legions over the great deep. For the night they were rid of their endless bliss—oh, the heat of these weary golden streets! Oh, the blinding glare of these gates of pearl! The coolness of night was theirs again, the fragrant sea, page 139 the starry dark. On clear calm evenings the soft swoosh, the soft roar of their flight, lasted for hours.

With the faintest break of dawn the callings and waitings and howlings and caterwaulings that had troubled the island began to lessen, and very quickly to cease. Birds, called to dry land by dusk, were now summoned oceanwards by returning light. The wet peat sweated them. Dazed with the darkness of their long imprisonment, brushing clumsily against the petty obstacles in their paths, in thousands they rolled like giant drops, or trickled like thin streams from the bare sides of the islands.

In the hour of departure, even whilst still on land, to many of them their first thought was of their wings. The pinions that so well deserved care were from time to time stretched aloft, the bird pausing in its progress to the cliff edge and vibrating the tips with the rapid tremor noticeable in newly hatched moths. To the last, Petrel as indifferent to fellow Petrel as stone to neighbouring stone, these grey ghosts of the grey dawn paused or followed one another in silent unconcern to the rocky bluffs. There, from projecting juts worn smooth by centuries of use, they fell into the air rather than flew away, one reaching the sea by a long glissade, then resting a while on the heaving deck; another dropping to sea-level, page 140 and then rising buoyant from the waves with quick little steps, as gulls rise from stretches of smooth sand. Not the spirits of departed Maoris winging their way across the ocean solitudes, flying back from northernmost cape to the land whence the race has sprung, seeking their ancient fatherland, could seem more utterly alone than each Petrel as he falls from the cliff edge and spreads his pinions to the air.

At last the hindermost bird has gone; at last, after the babbling of the busy night, silence prevails—a silence so sudden and distinct that often it has awakened me. Then, perhaps also awakened momentarily, and as if cheering the event, each Bellbird greets the quiet with a note of inexpressible freshness. There drops from each sleepy bird, motionless amid the dewy leaves, one single silver note, exquisite, unforgettable, of a strange sweetness, of an almost magical loveliness after the discords of the night. It was as though the clamorous rout of Comus had withdrawn, and that the lady of the play, spotless and pure, “breathing divine enchanting ravishment,” had reappeared.