‘Shorebird salesman’ Keith Woodley has spent more than three decades raising awareness of the miraculous migratory birds that find a safe haven near his doorstep.
Keith Woodley, the manager of the Pūkorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre in the Firth of Thames, has lived and worked right next door to the centre doing bird-related things for almost 32 years. Here are 800ha of intertidal flats. He lives on his own but he has thousands of neighbours when bar-tailed godwits, red knots and other migratory waders return from Arctic breeding grounds between September and March.
There are also more than 12,000 human visitors annually. By day, Woodley is chatty and sociable. It can be quite noisy at his place – all those birds and all those people chirping away. By nature, he is happy being solitary. He doesn’t find living alone lonely.
“You know, I think in all of us there is a blend. There’s a blend of the gregarious and the solitary. Some are at one end of the scale, totally sociable. Some are totally hermit-like. I’m somewhere in the middle.
“One of the great joys about this place ‒ one of the reasons I’ve stayed here so long ‒ is that there are opportunities for engaging with people from all over the place, engaging in conversations with all manner of people about all manner of things.”
He likes to read, listen to the music of his youth from the 60s, 70s and 80s, and to paint. What do you think he paints? That’s a rhetorical question. His watercolours of shorebirds are detailed and lovely; they are quietly celebratory and quietly captivating. They bring to mind a quote by Monet: “I would like to paint the way a bird sings.” He is 71. “Old enough to be having an adult conversation.”
Thirty-two years is a long time to be looking at and talking about birds. I asked a stupid question: does he ever get bored with birds? “No, it’s very difficult to get bored with birds. And when you drill down and get into the world of shorebirds, it’s quite impossible to get bored with shorebirds. The flagship species is, of course, the godwit and they just continue to amaze.”
The godwits have a magical allure. They are not show-offy birds. They are a bit dull-looking. People come from all over the world to admire them.
Their particular magic is what, exactly? “For me it starts off with a contrast. The godwit here is this sort of brown, nondescript bird with a long bill, walking around, poking its bill in the mud. And you say, ‘Okay, what’s so special about this?’ But then you realise what they do – that they don’t breed here, they breed in Alaska. And then they’ve got to figure out, ‘Well, how do I get from here to here and back?’ So, over time, they’ve developed all these tools and strategies, one of which involves these mammoth non-stop flights which just continue to astound everyone.”
A godwit’s flight
In 2007, the Pūkorokoro Miranda Naturalists’ Trust, which runs the centre near Kaiaua, tracked a female godwit, known as E7, with a satellite transmitter. E7 departed on March 17, and flew 10,200km from the Firth of Thames to Yalu Jiang, on the border of China and North Korea, from where she departed on May 1 to her breeding site in western Alaska, a further 7500km. On August 30, she left Alaska for New Zealand and flew 11,680km direct in eight days “landing at precisely the same site she had taken off from in March”. If that doesn’t astound you, you are clearly incapable of being astounded. Also, “when they fly, the sight of thousands upon thousands of godwits in the air is, I dunno … truly spectacular.”
Does he ever think about the very first godwit migration, and how it figured out that flying thousands of miles to one place and thousands of miles back to the place it came from would be a good idea? “Well, we get asked this, you know, ‘How did this come about?’ If we get Doctor Who’s Tardis and go back, we might be able to find a few answers. But otherwise you might need to learn to speak godwit so we can interrogate them.” I pretend to be amazed to learn that he still didn’t know how to speak godwit. “No, I still haven’t mastered it yet. If I could, then we could have a lot of answers.” This was very disappointing. I liked the idea of him chattering away in fluent godwit and the godwits chattering back.
He fell in love with birds accidentally. He doesn’t remember having any interest in birds as a kid. He knew the difference between a sparrow and a starling but that was about the extent of it. He grew up in Invercargill. His father did odd jobs, worked as a wharfie and had a clerical job at the freezing works. His mother was “what The New York Times calls a “homemaker”. She later had a part-time job in a book shop, which she loved, “which I can really, really relate to”.
He is the middle child of five ‒ he has three brothers and a sister. He was a shy kid who read all the time – comics and adventure yarns. He quite liked it when the family went fishing because it involved “having three hooks on a line with a worm on each hook, then putting the rod in the water and then sitting under a tree with a book and waiting for the fish to do all the work”. He went to the University of Otago and planned to be a history teacher, then was “flattered” into doing an honours degree in political studies under the ethicist and moral philosopher James Flynn. “I did get a degree … although the degree was a sort of cover story because I really majored in good times.” Then he sort of flitted about, a bit like a fantail.
Bird murals
He is a lifelong lefty, “which makes the current climate a somewhat pretty gloomy place to be”. He has a talent for economical understatement. In the 1980s, he was working as a mail sorter in Wellington and painting murals on interior walls in places such as wine bars and restaurants. “But I also had some indulgent friends who allowed me to practise on their kids’ bedroom walls. And, you know, for kids it just seemed obvious that birds and animals were good subjects. I’d go to the library and pick up books and started painting birds I’d never seen, like flamingos, pelicans, that sort of thing. One day, I became aware that, for the first time, I was really paying close attention to that real sparrow out the window and that real gull and that real shag sitting on the rock.” He wanted closer proximity to birds; to really study them “as a subject for art”.
He heard about what was then the Ornithological Society of New Zealand (now Birds New Zealand) and joined. He did some volunteer work on Little Barrier Island “chasing kākāpō and that sort of thing. And that cemented this whole birding thing. So without quite realising it I became born again. And I’ve been somewhat evangelical ever since.”
That’s one way of putting it – here’s another: Would he characterise himself as slightly obsessive? This is another rhetorical question. “I would emphasise ‘slightly’, he says. “I would say a strong interest would apply. And when it comes to the long-distance migrants, perhaps a passion for these birds, like the godwits.”
We somehow got into what might be categorised as an obsessive discussion about people who turn down the pages of books, which we both strongly believe ought to be a crime. “Yes, I support you on that. Just as I would advocate crimes against the language as being serious offences. Misuse of the word ‘sustainable’ should be a very serious offence.” So, ever so slightly obsessive then, says she who just contributed to a spirited conversation about the turning down of the pages of books.
It’s quite impossible to get bored with shorebirds. The flagship species is the godwit and they continue to amaze.
Does he know why people have a fascination with birds? Is it because they can fly and we can’t? “I think that is a large part of the attraction. That, plus the fact that there’s lots of different birds about the place. Some are really colourful, some have really interesting behaviours.
“I tell people who say, ‘What’s this birding all about?’ that if you take even a remote interest in the birds around you, to add it to whatever else your interests are, you are just adding an extra rich layer to whatever else drives you. All birds have a part to play in the tapestry.”
A lovely image that: a tapestry of birds. I had asked him to pretend to be a shorebird salesman. I’m sold.
He might be the most contented person I’ve yet encountered. He is perfectly at home in his own company, in the company of others and in his environment. He lives in a little Lockwood house which replaced the original, “crumbly” farm cottage he lived in for 22 years. His new house is by comparison “very swish”. It is about 30m from work, “so I’ve got a bit of a commute each day”. He has views that are even swisher. He can look across a shell beach to the Firth of Thames and the distant Coromandel Peninsula – from the hills south of Thames to Mt Moehau near the peninsula’s northern tip. “So it’s quite the view.”
50 years of birding
The Pūkorokoro Shorebird Centre and the naturalists’ trust turn 50 this year. That’s almost as miraculous as the godwits’ migrations. The trust is mostly funded by shorebird-mad people, of whom there are luckily enough to pay the bills, and income is generated by the centre and its shop. You can also stay there. They are currently fundraising for an “Eagles’ Hide” in honour of the late Jim Eagles, the prominent journalist and bird enthusiast (Woodley’s good friend and mine), who, upon retirement, edited the centre’s quarterly magazine, among other services.
In recognition of its first 50 years, the trust has decreed 2025 the Year of the Wrybill. The wrybill, which hangs out on mud flats is “a peculiar little bird with a bill curved to the side, like a spoon. It’s the only bird in the world with a bill like that.” It is thought that it uses this beak for getting insect larvae from beneath stones. “But then they’ll also use the bill to yank a worm out of the mud like everyone else. It’s a bit like a Swiss Army knife, with multi functions.” So it’s a likeable weirdo.
Are birders weirdos? “Birders come in all manner of forms. They’re a mirror of human society, but in my experience, most birders are very good people. They’re good company, mostly.” They are generally very well-behaved, he says. Of course they are. This is what you’d expect. Nobody goes to see a godwit with a view to harassing it, do they?
When people ask him what he does, does he say he’s a professional birder? “No, I just say I run an information centre or education centre. I wouldn’t call myself a professional birder, although I suppose by default I am because I get paid for what I’m doing. Some of it involves birding but a lot of it involves talking to other people about birds and birding and advising them where to go and what to look for, and that sort of thing.”
The evangelist is a birder, emphatically not a twitcher. “Well, there’s an element of disparagement about twitcher. And within the birding community you find a lot of birders who would say the same thing. Twitchers is an English expression: people who are obsessed with seeing new birds and building up their bird list. You get extreme behaviour where people are interested in seeing the bird, and once they’ve got it on their list they lose interest in it. Which can be a bit demoralising if you’ve gone to the effort of showing them the bird.”
You do get the impression that birders think twitchers are dilettantes and rather look down their bills at them.
What a lovely life he’s having. “Yeah, it’s been okay. These three decades have been, on the whole, very enjoyable.”
He wouldn’t want to get carried away. Tough. I’m going to say he does have a lovely life. He’s a thoroughly decent, and dedicated, good cove. So he deserves his lovely life. May he live happily ever after. That is what the godwits would say if they could speak English.
