For the birds

I spent Friday afternoon at Zealandia, the wildlife sanctuary in the old Karori reservoir in Wellington. My friend Jill was visiting from Christchurch and was keen to go there. Luckily we struck one of the few reasonable days we’ve had in the last month, and actually saw some sunshine. Zealandia is all about creating a protected environment that gets a close to pre-human New Zealand as possible. Given that the country is very short on native mammals, that means mostly birds, insects and lizards.

Walking along the muddy tracks through the bush was a trip back in time for me to how the bush must have seemed to William and Sarah. The early settlers were particularly taken by the abundant bird-life in New Zealand, as it was all new to them. There were none of the familiar English birds, not even the common sparrow, which didn’t arrive until 1866. For most of the settlers , the other astounding thing about New Zealand was that unlike in England, they were free to roam around and hunt, shoot, snare and eat the wildlife without risking being taken as poachers.

And eat the wildlife they certainly did. Written accounts of life and exploration in New Zealand in the 1840s read like a menu of today’s extinct and endangered birds. The kereru, or wood pigeon, perhaps, is understandable – seeing them around here, flying with all the grace and speed of the old Bristol Freighters – they would be an easy target and it’s not hard to imagine they might be finger-licking good in a hangi with some potatoes and kumera. But it’s shocking to read, for example, Edward Jerningham Wakefield’s description of the tui :

it resembles a blackbird in size and plumage, with two graceful bunches of white feathers under the neck. It abounds in the woods, and is remarkably noisy and active. Its most common note is a mixture of two or three graduated notes on a flute, a sneeze, and a sharp whistle; but it imitates almost every feathered inhabitant of the forest, and, when domesticated, every noise it hears

followed by the comment : “It is of a particularly sweet flavour, and very tender”.

Today conservationists like those at Zealandia work hard to provide refuges and breeding programmes for endangered species. Many of the birds that were so plentiful in the 1840s are endangered or extinct now; even back then, both Maori and naturalist alike were aware that some species were already extinct or very rare. But your average citizen of the 1840s, both pakeha and Maori, would not have imagined or even particularly cared that indiscriminate hunting might wipe out several species of birds.

So it seems this is yet another area where I have to find a balance – it’s the challenge of accurately re-creating a historical setting and lifestyle, without overly offending modern sensibilities. While it might be distasteful to imagine William and Sarah tucking into a feed of kereru from time to time, it’s very likely that they did, especially in the early years. There weren’t a lot of other poultry options as a change from pork and beef – the few chickens around were kept for eggs, and only found their way to the pot once they had stopped laying. Kereru were ridiculously easy to catch, and might have even been available to purchase from local Maori.

And, let’s face it, those early Victorians were far more used than we are to their food being close to its source. If Sarah cooked chicken (or pigeon), she wouldn’t have bought it skinned and boned, portion-sized, shrink-wrapped and labelled with nutritional information. She would have caught it and killed it, or bought the whole critter and plucked it herself. Apparently we’d be a whole lot healthier if we all followed the great-great grandma diet – which basically goes, if g-g-grandma wouldn’t recognise it as food, then don’t buy it or eat it – just think how much of the contents of the local supermarket would be a complete mystery to Sarah…