National News & Information > Features June 2007

At the end are the rainbows by Hugh Creasy

There ought to be a law against them. Black-back gulls that is. Two hundred and sixty three of them sat on the football field, excreting happily away, providing a slippery surface of vile bacteria for the kids who play there every Saturday morning.

Infected cuts and grazes will be the order of the day if the weather holds till Saturday and all the games are played. I know there are that many because Ted and I counted them. He counted all the ones north of the halfway mark and I counted all the ones south. They feed at the local tip and spend their evenings on playing fields around the district.

Years ago dogs were banned from playing fields because of the excreta left on the ground, but the droppings of wild birds far outweigh anything the dogs could have left behind. And the germs they pick up from their tip forays are probably far more dangerous than the average dog dropping.

Which is all somewhat off the subject.

Ted and I went to the park to check on a pair of paradise ducks that last year set up a domestic arrangement there. They brought up a family on the park, using the local stream and its overgrown banks for cover. The number of Paradise ducks in the valley has grown enormously, with nearly all the sports fields and school playgrounds having a resident pair.

A mild autumn has meant a high survival rate among mallards as well. Mallards spend most of their time in the stream , with forays into the hills to graze farm paddocks and fossick about in a couple of swamps far from crowded suburbs. In the evenings they return to the stream bed, well below the surrounding neighbourhood, and have a supper of bread crusts and scraps from people who like to feed birds.

The Paradise ducks were on the park, surrounded by gulls. They stood, heads up and nervously alert, not feeding, well and truly intimidated by their new neighbours. They are grazers, with a special liking for juicy clover and young ryegrass, which makes them a nuisance to farmers, but they do little damage in the suburbs apart from their large, lumpy droppings and persistent calling in the spring when they want to protect their territories.

They can be the bane of anglers’ lives when they persist in flying upstream from pool to pool, with their nagging call, flapping their wings in great displays of injury, feigned, of course. Then you see their young, silvery grey with dark stripes, bobbing down the river, and all the resentment you feel for the adult disappears. The youngsters are just so cute, they’re almost breathtaking.

The adults come to a call and decoy well, but they will never win any fans for the quality of their flesh. It is coarse and can be tough in an older bird. I have eaten it cooked in almost every way possible, from roasting the whole bird to quick-frying with thinly sliced strips cut across the grain, then soaked in soy sauce and served with rice. I have also tried it corned like corned beef. With a generous dollop of mustard, it made great sandwiches. The best result I had was mincing the breast meat with rashers of streaky bacon, adding ginger and garlic, with a dash of chilli, and turning it into meatballs or burgers. It goes down fine with a cheap Aussie red wine – one of those really jammy ones from the Barossa Valley. Add salty chips and it’s cold weather comfort food.

It’s a bird that lacks elegance, without the grace of a swan or the purposeful energy of a duck, or the fat rotundity that signals delicious potential in a real goose. But it is a survivor. Sixty years ago it was rare to see one outside national parks, then they started to colonise the rich swards of newly sown paddocks. Now they have taken up residence in the suburbs, on football fields and golf courses. Along with pukekos they are the most visible of native birds, and the most hunted.

Successful adaptation has brought with it a boom in population where conditions suit. The huge congregations of juvenile birds in autumn lead to fouled and denuded paddocks and farmers welcome the attentions of hunters. It is going to be a challenge to find methods to control urban populations if they adapt to urban areas as well as they have to rural.

Ted and I checked out the birds, then walked the stream bank, looking for signs of spawning fish. Most urban streams in New Zealand have suffered from terrible neglect. Local bodies see them only as drains and in industrial areas they are used almost as secondary tip sites. Where water runoff from roads runs into streams, oil from service station forecourt washing and passing traffic leaves a slick on the water’s surface. Some of the fish I have caught in these polluted streams have been so affected by oil their flesh stinks of it.

There is a remnant population of trout in the headwaters of this stream, too small to be of interest to officialdom, but interesting to see if it can survive against the odds. Years ago trout could be seen in the pools below bridges as they made their way into the headwaters for spawning. They were big fish, far too big to survive in the stream through spring and summer.

They came from the estuary and you could count their redds from the sea far into the hills. Ted and I looked but saw none. There is still a week or two for a winter spawning run, but the odds are not looking good.

We did, however, come across a family of pukekos strolling along the stream bed. They were far from any wetland, so I can only assume some kind property owner has them nesting and fossicking in their back yard. For a gardener it would require great forbearance to put up with pukekos. They are hugely destructive with prized plants, and have a massive appetite to go along with their massive beaks, and their noisy calls in the middle of the night can lead to nightmares.

So, it looks like the country is coming to town. It will be interesting to see the reception it gets.

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