KEY POINTS:
I've never actually clapped eyes on Steve Braunias, although my patient stalking through the landscape of local journalism has landed me at sites he has recently vacated characterised by slightly soiled nests and plenty of ruffled feathers. Until now, I had little notion of his true nature. All of my judgments were based on glimpses of his iridescent literary plumage - dark, bright, colourful, depending on the light and context.
Here at last, though, in the latest in Awa Press' worthy Ginger Series of essays, I got the chance to get up-close and personal.
It turns out that our man Braunias is a closet twitcher. Some, of course, would protest that he does the bulk of his twitching in public, and would proceed to enumerate many of his more entertaining tics, but this would be to misunderstand. For it also turns out that twitching is the term used in ornithological circles to describe the avid spotting of rare birds, commonly as a competitive pastime. And Steve Braunias is a birdwatcher, or birder, as they prefer to call themselves.
For him, and unlike for the rest of the local birding fraternity, it hasn't been a lifelong passion, or the result of having been born tall, rangy, with a predilection for facial hair and in England. (You get the impression from his descriptions of his fellow birders that the low-growing, clean-shaven, Kiwi-bred Braunias is a queer bird in Ornithological Society circles).
Rather, it's the result of a kind of Road-to-Damascus experience he had when he was nearly sconed by a passing black-backed gull (Larus domicianus) as he was standing on the balcony of his partner's Auckland apartment a little over a year ago. This chance encounter brought birds to his attention, the scales fell from his eyes, and he began to take notice of them, and the peculiar, underground fraternity (and sorority) who stalk them with bins (birding shorthand for binoculars) at the ready.
Along the way, he claims to have glimpsed a new geography of New Zealand, a sense of these lazy, sensual isles as they were before and shortly after human habitation: birdland. He writes knowledgeably, and with an enthusiasm that rivals H5N1 for infectiousness, about all your feathered friends and a whole bunch you never knew you had.
There's an attempt to interweave his own nesting habits - in particular the prospective birth of his first child with the stories of his winged heroes, but How to Watch a Bird is, as the title promises it to be, a guide to birding in New Zealand.
For those who think they know Braunias from his columns, it's as much a revelation as his own discovery of a passion for bar-tailed godwits, South Island pied oystercatchers and wrybills to see him writing so earnestly and tenderly about any subject.
Sure, there is a sprinkling of tit jokes, and shag jokes, an amount of iconoclasm - the notion that Maori were the original conservators of New Zealand's ornithological resources gets short shrift, as does Robin Hyde's identification of a national sense of exile with the migratory instincts of godwits and I have to admit it was all so deadpan I began to suspect it was all made up.
But no. Look up some of the key facts and the characters he describes on the internet and they check out. In the end, it's the sheer incongruity that makes this such a grand read. There's something precarious about the amiable and vulnerable eccentrics who populate the birding scene at the mercy of so habitually acerbic a pen as Braunias' - like a rifleman or a rock wren cupped in a bushman's hand.
* Awa Press, $24.99
- Canvas
