High Country Lark Read online

  Jack Holloway’s ashes — and those of his son, John — are scattered at the site of Joseph Fenn’s cottage on Arcadia Station.

  On the 1:50,000 topographical map, ‘Earnslaw’, the rock shelter rendezvous appears to be somewhere near the upper limit of forest. It’s not much more than seven kilometres from the Paradise road on the map, but the intervening gullies, creeks, windfalls, and my tuning-in stops, not to mention the 500-metre gain in altitude, drag out the journey. Anyway, to rush through a forest, whether it’s new to you or not, is somehow offensive to its natural rhythms. Can trees, among the planet’s largest living things, much older than mammals, hear without ears, see without eyes?

  Towards mid-afternoon, and nearing the tree line, I notice a character change in the forest, with silver beech more prominent now among the mountain beech (red beech ran out a long way back). Soon I am walking in semi-open shrubland and stunted forest. Turret Head, conspicuous from the Dart Valley but seldom seen from this side, is standing tall in the distance, its knobbly ramparts silhouetted in the afternoon sun, and Earnslaw’s skirt of glacier ice, most of it in shade, is a reminder of the increasing altitude. Here, the Earnslaw Burn has lost its rough-and-tumble nature and much of its volume. Instead, it babbles across a wide bed of gravel, clear, blue-green and enjoying its last few hundred metres of relative serenity before plunging through the first of its forested gorges.

  I’m reminded of a line from a poem by the Cuban patriot-poet, José Martí, ‘The stream of the mountains pleases me more than the sea’. His poem was put to music and made popular in the 1960s through the song, Guantanamera. Besides its socialist connotations, it hints at the fascination of headwater streams, of journeys just begun, of water tracking through terrain where humans often cannot go. The upper reaches of the Earnslaw Burn would surely please a high-country angler whirling a barbed fly at these sparkling waters, trout or no trout. How ironic, that in the absence of rain, the river’s flow will nonetheless be increasing through the day from ice melt, its source.

  The edge of the forest is patchy, as if fires in the past have made inroads on the tree line. The vegetation here is a confused mosaic of beech trees, shrubland containing small-leaved olearia and hebe shrubs, the giant speargrass Aciphylla scott-thomsonii, and snow tussock grassland, their golden flowerheads glistening. I look across the river for sign of a rock shelter. I am no expert when it comes to rock bivvies. Is the Lark here yet? From which direction might he arrive? I wander on, with the valley broadening into a subalpine zone. The track, looking like an overgrown sheep track, is suddenly a lot flatter and inviting. There is nothing more exhilarating than a flat walk among mountains with running water for company.

  Exploring a few minutes farther on, I come upon a cliff of layered schist and ledges to the right of the track — likely habitat for falcons because of the burn nearby. Water is cascading over one side of the cliff. At its foot is a low overhang, sloping towards the river and offering shelter from northerly rains. It contains makeshift split-level accommodation, the kind of shelter I fancy a family of North American Indians might build for use on seasonal journeys. There are two sleeping berths lined with dry tussock grass, each berth made level by a low retaining wall of rocks. The upper berth is protected by a canvas awning, the only imported material in sight.

  If the Earnslaw Burn were in flood from a northerly storm and too dangerous to cross, this would be a blessing for anyone without a tent. But the shelter I am seeking, according to the Earnslaw map, is on the opposite side of the river. I backtrack.

  ‘Ahoy!’ shouts a familiar, though disembodied, voice. It is coming from shaded forest and a dark line of cliffs downstream, on the other side. ‘Get your feet wet! Walk a hundred yards!’

  So I end the trek as I began it, wading through the river. Considering its icy source, the water feels remarkably warm, solar-heated through the riffles, and strangely nurturing, too. A river is a paradox. Fish it for ideas and you’ll find a creative entity, a community of plant and animal life, and a life force that is cleansing, thirst-quenching and buoyantly hopeful. But fish it, too, for its dark side and you’ll discover an awesome power, death and destruction. Māori have long regarded water/wai as sacred and supremely important to health. A proverb expresses it thus: He huahua te kai? E, he wai te kai. Are preserved birds the best food? No, water is!

  Holding these thoughts, I cross the Earnslaw Burn to be met by the Lark at one of his favourite haunts. Compared to the rock shelter on the other side of the river, this mapped one is a hotel. It has a lofty ceiling with beech trees overhanging it, beds and mattresses, a table fashioned from a flat slab of schist, a folding camp chair, a fireplace built of rocks, firewood stacked handy, and a water supply trickling off the overhang a short walk from the living space. There is even a new blue bucket, purchased for ninety-nine cents from the Warehouse according to the label, for collecting water. The rock ceiling is smudged from campfire smoke, and there is a wisp adding to it now because the Lark has a fire going with a blackened billy rigged up over it.

  My first impression of the bivvy is that it is constructed of several huge blocks of schist that lean against each other and hopefully won’t topple further — even in a major earthquake. Slabs of schist lying in the vicinity suggest it has been rattled in the past. The bivvy catches the morning sun but the afternoon sun reflecting off the brown face of the valley opposite, casts a strong diffuse light into it.

  ‘Got a brew going. Gumboot okay?’

  ‘Anything will do,’ I say, dropping my pack and taking a seat on a smooth rock by the fireplace. I think about releasing my feet from the sodden socks and boots but they can wait. ‘Nice place. When did you get here?’

  ‘Late yesterday. Come over the saddle from Paradise.’ He says this as if it were a Sunday afternoon romp instead of the crossing of a range steep on both sides. Forest swathes the Dart side of the range, tussock the Earnslaw Burn slopes, and there is a high-sided gravel pass at the top.

  The Lark tosses another stick on the fire. ‘Jack Holloway thought nothing of it,’ he says, as if reading my sceptical mind.

  ‘You mean the Otago climber?’

  ‘The very same. Fit as a trout. He’d come up from Dunedin and stay at the old cottage on Arcadia, the one Joseph Fenn built for himself. He’d often have some of his varsity mates with him. For a bit of recreation — not the serious climbing he’s famous for — he’d shoot over to the Alpine Club’s Twenty-five Mile Hut in the Rees Valley. And what for? To pick raspberries, that’s what. Could do it in a day, some people reckon — there and back.’

  I haul out my map. This sounds like an incredible feat, and yes, I see it involves Fiordland National Parks in the 1930s. I knew he and his family holidayed at the Head of the Lake but I wasn’t aware of the Fenn connection. Fenn died at Frankton Hospital in 1924, a few years before Jack Holloway’s stellar spell of mountaineering.

  Feeding habits

  Unlike the North Island kōkako, which live mostly in podocarp forest, South Island kōkako tend to be found in beech forest. It is not a hard-and-fast rule, however. Stewart Island, undoubtedly one of the last refuges of the species, intriguingly has no beech forest so those birds had to be podocarp dwellers. And in parts of the West Coast, especially inland from Charleston, there have been reports since the millennium of kōkako calls and movements in the podocarp forest growing on limestone.

  Although there are few records of their diet, it seems South Island kōkako eat a variety of forest products, including fruit (coprosma and horopito berries, for example), seeds, leaves, ferns, moss and insects such as beetles and caterpillars. Their stout finch-like bill, curved downwards, with the upper mandible overlapping the lower, would suggest a wide-ranging diet.

  North Island kōkako feed like parrots, grasping the food item in one foot while perching and bending down to reach it. South Island kōkako may behave similarly.

  Moss figures in the diet of both North and South Island birds, specifically the moss Dicranol
oma menziesii, which forms on the ground and over logs, and can climb a short distance up trees. Typically the birds pluck ‘powder puff’ clumps off the moss with a sideways flick of beak and head, and searchers look out for the ‘powder puffs’ and the gouging into the soil as a sign of kōkako activity. The food value comes mainly from seed capsules on the stalks, which are stripped as the bird lifts its head. The moss is also a source of insects and water.

  ‘They reckon he’d break into a jog when the going was good,’ says the Lark.

  We sip our tea, with the roar of the river about twenty-five metres below the bivvy bouncing off the cliff face. I have read that in his sixties Bill O’Leary could also travel at a fast clip on his prospecting trips. The Lark is made of the same stuff. In the past I’ve been pushed to keep up with him.

  ‘Hear any kōkako on the way in?’ The question is not altogether tongue-in-cheek.

  ‘Not a bong,’ I say. ‘Never really expected to hear anything.’

  ‘Well, keep listening and keep looking.’

  The Lark tells me he knows of a couple of deer hunters who were in the Greenstone Valley in the early 1990s and reported seeing a kōkako near the Sly Burn Hut, where the track turns off to the Mararoa River and Mavora Lakes. The hunters were from the North Island, and one of them was familiar with North Island kōkako. It was a reliable sighting. Much earlier, there were kōkako stories doing the rounds when the Lark was a lad holidaying at Glenorchy, including one about the shearer who shot a kōkako out the back of the Rees Valley Station woolshed around 1932, and other reports of kōkako, mainly calls heard intermittently in the Hunter Creek forest, the next major creek above the Lennox.

  ‘Bird deserves its nickname,’ says the Lark.

  ‘Nickname?’

  ‘The Grey Ghost. It’s a spooky bird, too true. Cunning at concealment. Best chance of seeing a kōkako is before dawn, so I’ve heard. A ventriloquist, you know. Throws its voice real special like.’

  I’m thinking it’s a pity it hasn’t thrown a few more feathers over the years. Only one feather that I know of has been recovered from the wild and scientifically identified. It came from Stewart Island in early 1987. Wildlife Service officer Dave Crouchley picked it up in the Rakeahua catchment — an area dubbed Koka Valley — during a joint Wildlife Service/Forest Service search over the 1986–87 summer. Presumed kōkako contacts at the time included the sighting of long-tailed bird flying with a slow wingbeat, and numerous calls presumed to be those of kōkako: ‘took’, ‘clack’ and a note ‘like a guitar string being tuned’. Five kōkako were thought to be taking part in this contact, and the written report of it described the calls as having ‘peculiar resonant and directional qualities’ that made recording of them difficult. At the same time the valley’s bellbirds and tūī were joining the vocal fray, ‘noticeably excited’.

  What of the feather? It was sent to Otago Museum zoologist John Darby with no hint of the possible source species. John analysed the body feather. It had a distinctive shaft structure and ‘looseness’. He concluded it was from Callaeas. Nothing surer. For corroboration and molecular analysis, the feather was later passed to a researcher at the University of Amsterdam in Holland. Back came his assessment: Callaeas, yes, and from a living bird.

  It’s probably only of academic interest now, twenty years on, but no trace of this feather can be found. When the Dutch researcher left Amsterdam, the feather disappeared, adding international mystery to the story of New Zealand’s most enigmatic bird.

  No one has reported kōkako in the Earnslaw Burn for a long time.

  Having had time to properly take in my surroundings, I am curious as to how a rock shelter so far off the beaten track should be so well appointed. My host tells me the beds were brought in for the use of a Department of Conservation gang who spent days clearing windfall trees from the track. The bed bases and mattresses came from the refurbished Dart Hut on the Rees-Dart tramping circuit. Those track-clearers certainly went to some trouble to get a good night’s sleep. They mounted the wire-weave bases on to young beech trees cut to length and made level on a foundation of rocks. There are only three bed bases, but half a dozen mattresses to choose from, parked on their ends at the back of the bivvy. I notice, too, a bag of nails and another bag containing orange plastic triangles, hundreds of them, for track marking. Work in progress.

  The Lark, I soon discover, has brought dinner. It’s a rabbit from over Paradise way, freshly shot and skinned, and he sets it over the fire to roast.

  ‘I like a roast of rabbit,’ he says. ‘Not the numbers there used to be, mind. RHD has knocked them back. That and the odd bit of shooting.’ He is referring to the virus imported illegally years ago by southern New Zealand farmers desperate to control rabbit plagues.

  While the Lark gets on with roasting the rabbit, I hang out damp socks and fetch water. The air is cooling down now but the rocks retain some heat from the morning sun. Central heating for half the night, as the Lark might say.

  ‘Need to keep an eye on the socks,’ I’m advised. ‘A kea could make off with them.’

  However unlikely that may seem, I am aware of the craftiness of kea. A writer friend of mine from Dunedin, Philip Temple, has a bundle of stories about their prankish behaviour and their intelligence. He has long studied kea in the field and written much about the parrot of the mountains. I relate for the Lark a story that Philip reckons best sums up kea intelligence.

  Years ago, in the Crow Valley near Mount Rolleston, Arthur’s Pass National Park, Philip was climbing high up on the valley’s tussock slopes and came upon a group of kea playing around. He’d heard stories of the parrots picking the eyes out of dead climbers and wondered what they would do if he lay down and pretended to be dead or seriously injured. He stretched out on the tussock close to the track. Soon a bird came to investigate. He caught its movement out of almost-shut eyes. Then he felt a pebble land on his chest. The bird was flinging stones at him to see if the human really was dead. Philip threw the pebble back. In those days there was a sign at the Homer Hut in Fiordland, warning climbers to watch out for kea throwing rocks on them from a height.

  The Lark’s eyes lighten: ‘Want to hear my best kea yarn? It’s from the Rock Burn, not far from where we had lunch a couple of months back.’

  Here then is the story. A kind of kea street theatre is what it’s about. The setting, appropriately enough, is Theatre Flat in the upper reaches of the Rock Burn. The year is 1960, between Christmas and New Year. The Lark happens to be camped at the flat’s rock shelter, enjoying a fine spell of weather and a break from his agricultural studies at Lincoln University. At the same time, closer to the river, three keen young trampers from Wellington, not much younger than him, are tenting at the edge of an open area. From their conversations he deduces they have just come over Park Pass after an arduous circuit through the Pyke and other valleys west of the divide, and they are heading for Sugarloaf Pass and the Routeburn road end next day, all going well.

  The grassy area beside their camp site is picturesquely defined by huge boulders deposited by a glacier eons ago and a scatter of stunted beech trees, some of which, as if to demonstrate the dogged persistence of plant life, are sprouting right out of the boulders. It is a natural amphitheatre worthy of Middle Earth.

  In the early evening, from about 6 o’clock, some twenty kea assemble at the site. It appears as if they have been summonsed. At least, that’s how the campers and the Lark see it. What they see they can hardly believe. An older bird, looking rather sad and bedraggled, is in the middle of the clearing, encircled by the other birds. From the raucous chatter, the trampers conclude that the older bird is undergoing some kind of disciplinary action. A few of the encircling birds take turns at tormenting the accused, rushing at it and attacking it before rejoining the circle. After a time all the birds withdraw to roost on the boulders or in the trees, and later they reassemble for a repeat performance of their kea ‘court’. The drama lasts no more than two hours, and all is quiet ove
rnight. In the morning the birds have gone.

  I tell the Lark we ought to drink to a yarn like that. I produce my whisky flask. The sun is low enough by now to justify a drink, although it is still illuminating the far side of the valley. This far west, the sun sets late. If nothing else the Scotch will ease the soreness in my feet.

  ‘I never again saw keas behaving like they did at Theatre Flat that evening,’ the Lark says. ‘A Christmas treat, they were. Not as many keas around nowadays.’

  The story reminds me of a BBC wildlife documentary, screened on television a couple of years ago, that compared animal intelligence across a range of species. Kea came out on top, beating even dogs. Colourful clowns, mischievous thieves, destructive scavengers or entertaining rogues, love ’em or hate ’em, kea have lived in these southern mountains for tens of thousands of years. Their population decline is a concern.

  Meanwhile, we are dining on roast rabbit and a few trimmings that came in cans and the whole tasty caboodle is washed down with whisky. Not a bad combination. The Lark seems to agree. The Scotch has him talking.

  ‘Last time I was through here, you know, I could have had venison for dinner. Come across a young red deer stag caught up in tussock. Strong as rope, snow tussock. The poor bugger’s antlers were entangled. Had been for some time, judging by the way the ground was all gouged up around the animal. It must have got snagged while grazing underneath a clump of tussock. I took pity on it. Cut it free.’

  We are silent for a bit, letting the crackle of the campfire and the rush of river water have their say. Whether the Lark is still thinking about the snagged deer, I’m not sure, but I’d be keen to hear his thoughts on an official form of entanglement that is exercising high-country minds big time. It is called tenure review — the great clash of pastoralism, nature conservation and outdoor recreation that looks like it will keep the high country embroiled in controversy well into the twenty-first century. I mention the pessimism I found at Mount Earnslaw Station and await my friend’s response. It is not long coming.