Philippa Stevenson: Birdman’s work a tuneful legacy

When John Kendrick says he knows where all the birds are in the country he's not joking. As well, he has a huge and comprehensive film and sound record of them.

It's thanks to Kendrick that Radio New Zealand can play birdcalls twice daily on its flagship Morning Report.

This week saw a storm of protest after the programme threatened to shoot the birdcalls from the airwaves. If the bop-the-bird bid wasn't a publicity stunt it should have been. But it's not the first time the birds have been under the gun.

From his Waipu vege garden where he was planting parsnips, 82-year-old Kendrick told me a similar misguided move "stirred enormous sentiment" in the 1970s.

He thinks there might have been a poll taken that showed the birdcall was the most popular thing on the radio, and the saga featured in the Listener.

Known to many as Johnny, Kendrick was with the NZ Wildlife Service for 20 years, signing on in 1964 as a visual aids officer - a broad brief that meant he filmed and recorded the sounds of wildlife from bush depths to mountain heights.

It enabled him to pioneer natural sound recording in New Zealand and, with colleagues like black robin saviour Don Merton - a mere trainee when Kendrick first met him - to use recorded bird songs to capture and transfer endangered birds to predator-free islands.

As his sound library grew, so did his irritation at a monotonous squawk played regularly on the wireless and around 1969 he supplied National Radio with 16 more pleasing birdcall recordings.

His equipment improved, he moved to stereophonic recording and more birdsong was supplied to National Radio. He's not sure how many he supplied but nearly 40 years on they are still the calls listeners hear every morning.

Many recordings were made "with great difficulty and a lot of persistence".

The kakapo gave him the biggest physical challenge. With 40kg of gear he tramped for five hours into the Tutuko Valley near Milford Sound to get the first recording of the bird.

There were many firsts and, tragically, some lasts. Sadly, he has been the final witness to birds that have become extinct.

He is one of the few to have heard the melodious call of the piopio, the native thrush, and is on record for making the final sighting of the North Island wren. "It was January 28, 1956. I remember it very clearly."

He also took the only film of the greater short-tailed bat. But more happily, on Adams Island 500km south of New Zealand, he spotted the first Auckland Island snipe seen in 102 years.

In 1976, he spent four months studying wildlife recording with the BBC Natural History Unit, met David Attenborough, and later accompanied a BBC team filming here.

Work, he says, was wonderful. "I was doing what I loved and getting paid for it."

The recordings were used in the training of service staff and Kendrick also did 50 lectures a year to schools and service clubs.

"At the end of each year I would've talked to 6000 kids and lost my voice," he said.

The Wildlife Service library of film - much of it transferred to video - and sound went to the Conservation Department and Kendrick lost track of its whereabouts.

He saved some film from the dustbin and after retiring in 1982 spent eight years building up his own sound archive. He separately filmed many of his work experiences on his own camera and estimates he also has 30,000m of film plus soundtrack.

At the behest of his daughter, zoologist Karen Baird who has followed his wildlife and adventure lifestyle, he has identified the location of every shot.

Baird, who with husband Chris Gaskin runs specialist tour company Kiwi Wildlife Tours, says her father's love of the outdoors and legendary storytelling set her on her life's path.

"He has lovely stories about everything. A bird was not just a name, it was an adventure story as well."

Kendrick continues as an occasional tour guide for his daughter, another of his occupations that goes back a long way.

Over the past 10 months he's been settling into a new home at Waipu, getting the garden going between checking on the wading birds on the nearby estuary, signing up to help DoC, Forest and Bird and the Bream Island Trust.

This week he fired off an email to Radio New Zealand to put them right about where their birdcalls originated.

Listeners believe the bird song is a national treasure. Clearly the man who got them is one too.