South Island Takahē

---

Orbell wondered about the animal that had made the sounds, as he very often did. He considered all the places where it might be hiding now. The ground here was covered by two feet of grass which flowed down the steep hillsides, towards the lake in the basin of the valley. Orbell considered conducting a search, but concluded that he had no real desire to spend the evening crawling through all this brush, desperately searching for a birdsong.

Before it grew dark, the party left the fjord through a gap in the hills. This path led them across the beach that fringed the lake. This was where they found the footprints. Orbell recognised them instantly from the bird’s call and his daydream upon the slope. More than this, however, he recognised the tracks from his childhood fantasies in Otago, and a dozen half-wild tales he’d heard since of a creature that should have died long ago.

In the thirteenth century, the Māori people arrived in New Zealand from the Polynesian Islands, and found a land brimming with unchallenged life. Birds dominated much of the islands and, largely unchecked by predators, they had grown tall and round and brazen. The Māori, faced with such abundance, feasted – as humans tend to.

The South Island Takahē is a portly bind that stands at just over half a meter tall. It is red-beaked, with a shining, indigo-blue head and body. Its shoulders, wings and tail are green and its legs thick, pink and slow. It was very difficult to miss. By the eighteenth century (when Europeans arrived in New Zealand), most of these birds had been eaten.

Only four Takahē were ever seen by Europeans during the first two hundred years of their occupation. Three of these were caught by the dogs they had brought with them. The last of these incidents was in 1898, on the shore of lake Te Anau. This bird managed to escape the cooking pot (if not the dog) and was duly stuffed and mounted in the Otago Museum in Dunedin, New Zealand. It was declared the last of the Takahē.

In 1919, the eleven-year-old Geoffrey Orbell found a picture of the Otago museum’s Takahē amongst his mother’s photographs. She recounted the story of the extinct bird – the plump and plodding Takahē which had once been everywhere and was now, the scientists supposed, nowhere.

The young Orbell become obsessed with this word: “supposed”.

Orbell became fixated upon the bird and the idea that it might have survived in some secret pocket of New Zealand. As he matured, so did his fascination: he began to hunt for stray tales of it wherever he went. There was the story of a group of sailors who had once chased an unusually blue, goose-sized bird across the sands at Dusky Sound, in the southwest of New Zealand’s South Island. Sometimes, the stories were as plain as an unfamiliar call once heard by a wanderer, or an unusual footprint on some half-forgotten beach. No matter how vague the stories, though, two threads always seemed to connect them; every sighting had taken place upon a beach, following a snow fall.

By 1945, the adult Orbell had staked out the fjord-land near Te Anau as the most likely hiding spot of the supposed Takahē. His first expedition took place on April 11, 1948. Alongside his friends, Rex Watson and Neil McCrostie, he undertook the four-hour climb into the fjord. The party came out atop tall cliffs which looked down into a valley soaked with snowgrass and cradling a lake. It was here that Orbell, reclining upon the slope and waiting for his companions, would first hear the bird which had followed him around since his childhood. The two long, deep notes, repeated twice; the call of the supposed Takahē.

When they found the bird’s footprints on that beach, Orbell had measured them with scratches upon his pipe (reasoning that he couldn’t lose something that was always in his mouth) and submitted them to Otago University. His findings received mixed reviews. Some believed the tracks were too large; that they must belong to some common bird instead. Orbell was convinced, however, and he was not alone.

In November of that year, a local paper printed rumours of another group who were planning to set out into the fjord-land before Christmas and uncover the lost bird. Orbell, fearing his childhood dream was about to be stolen away, immediately organised another expedition. They set out that very weekend (joined, this time, by a Miss J.L. Telfer), determined to find the bird, finally and indisputably.

Less than twenty yards from where they had found the footprints in April, they found it: the supposed bird; the lost South Island Takahē. It wandered calmly across the beach, entirely indifferent to its own extinction. Here was the manifestation of Orbell’s childhood dreams. The bird that had, for him, always existed beyond some photograph or campfire story.

A second Takahē appeared to them. Then a third. They seemed unperturbed by the return of humans to their world and simply pottered about in the snowgrass. The first two did not even seem alarmed when the team encircled them in a fishing net for examination. Orbell and his colleagues treated the birds far more gently than humans historically had. They left their feathers un-plucked and their legs un-cooked. Instead, they simply set themselves to translating this bird from myth and recipe into reality.

Since that day, the population of the bird, which has persisted so nonchalantly despite humanity, has wavered. From approximately four hundred at the time of Orbell’s rediscovery in 1948, only a hundred and twenty-one survived by 1982. This decline was blamed on competition and predation from introduced species.

The bird has had a recent resurgence, however, following the introduction of programs to monitor and control populations of deer and stoats within its habitat. Takahē chicks are also being raised in captivity prior to release in the wild and specimens have even been translocated to similar environments on neighbouring islands which are free of invasive species.

Whilst the bird’s future is still uncertain, the population rose to around three hundred in 2015. For now, the Takahē continues to wander largely beyond the reach of humans – apparently unconcerned with us or the peril we have surrounded it with. What we can say with certainty, however, is that this bird remains defiantly un-eaten.

---