Between November 2023 and March 2024, Natural History curator Colin Miskelly is walking the length of Aotearoa New Zealand on Te Araroa Trail – counting every bird seen or heard along the way. In this eighteenth blog in the series, Colin describes the birds (and lizards) encountered while exiting the McKenzie Basin and walking over remote mountain passes to reach Lake Hāwea and Wānaka. He also expresses his dismay at the outcome of the Bird of the Century competition.

Farewell to the McKenzie Country – and Canterbury

There was a further day of flat, dry country walking as we headed south from Twizel – alongside Lake Ruataniwha and the Ōhau River to Lake Ōhau. After more than a fortnight out in the open, we finally entered forest as we climbed up Freehold Creek to cross the Ōhau Range into the Ahuriri River catchment.

The Ahuriri River is the southernmost Canterbury river (it joins with the Waitaki River) and is the largest river that must be forded by Te Araroa walkers. After a month with little rain, it was fast-flowing but barely deep enough to get our shorts wet.

From the Ahuriri River, Te Araroa walkers climb up the Avon Burn to Mt Martha Saddle (1680 m), which is the trail boundary between Canterbury and Otago Provinces. We had entered Canterbury at Waiau Pass more than three weeks previously, though 1.5 days of this was our brief visit to the West Coast.

Taking the high road into Central Otago

After 14.4 km of beech forest alongside the Tīmaru River, Te Araroa Trail climbed again to the stunning viewpoint of Breast Hill, which towers over the east side of Lake Hāwea.

It was a steep descent down to Lake Hāwea, followed by 1.5 days of walking the margins of Lake Hāwea and Wānaka, and the Hāwea River, which flows between the two lakes.

A diversity of tracks and trail users

Te Araroa Trail was created by stitching together existing tracks and trails, and creating a few new sections to fill gaps where required. Many of the tracks that have become parts of Te Araroa Trail had been created for other reasons, including farm tracks, 4WD tracks, pack horse trails, and mountain bike tracks. In most cases, these other uses have continued, though signage and trail notes generally give some warning about what might be coming around the next corner.

A rare encounter

Before leaving Twizel, I met with local Department of Conservation staff to discuss the best places to look for kakī | black stilt along Te Araroa Trail as I headed south (having failed to see any between Tekapo and Twizel). They told me that I would be very lucky to see a kakī near the trail in late February – and I was! The following morning we found an adult kakī on the lower Ōhau River, just above where it flows into Lake Ruataniwha.

The kakī is one of New Zealand’s rarest birds, with fewer than 160 adults known to be alive. Kakī face numerous threats, including introduced predators, weed encroachment on riverbeds, changed river management regimes (including hydroelectric power generation, and water abstraction for irrigating), and hybridisation with the closely related pied stilt | poaka.

Kakī would likely be extinct if they had not been the focus of intensive conservation management effort for more than 40 years, focused on control of pest mammals plus captive-rearing of young birds hatched from eggs taken from both captive and wild pairs. This encourages the birds to lay again, and the chicks have much higher survival rates in aviaries, before being released once they are a few months old.

A commotion of coots

Shortly before finding the kakī, we added another bird species to the trip list, with half a dozen Australian coots in a bay near the head of Lake Ruataniwha.

These more aquatic relatives of pūkeko are found in low numbers throughout the country. However, as they have specific habitat requirements (shallow lakes with abundant weed growing on the lakebed), they are not found on every lake. I was still surprised that we had to walk more than 2,000 km to find one.

Bird of the Century

The spectacular Australasian crested grebe | pūteketeke was present on Lake Ruataniwha (9 seen), but its densest population in Aotearoa is on Lake Wānaka, where they nest on floating platforms provided for them in the marina north of the town centre.

The floating nest platforms means there is no risk of nests being flooded if the lake level rises, and as the marina is a ‘no wake’ zone with slow boat speeds required, there is little risk of the nests being affected by waves created by boat wake.

The pūteketeke received much publicity in November 2023 when it was controversially voted to be New Zealand’s Bird of the Century. I missed the kerfuffle as I was already on Te Araroa Trail and had no reason and little opportunity to pay attention to media – whether newsworthy or not. I only learnt of John Oliver and the pūteketeke gerrymandering after Te Papa colleagues told me that New Zealand Birds Online had crashed temporarily due to the number of searches for pūteketeke (I administer the website, which is hosted on the Te Papa server).

[Insert gratuitous snipe image here – Ed]

The Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society had its origins in 1923. As part of their centenary celebrations, Forest and Bird expanded their annual Bird of the Year competition to ‘Bird of the Century’, and included five bird species that had become extinct in the last 100 years among the 75 species that voters could select.

I rarely pay much attention to the competition (why would your favourite bird change from one year to the next?), but for once they included an option that got my voting finger twitching. I have studied all the forms of New Zealand snipes since I first visited the Snares Islands in 1982, including completing my PhD on them. I expected that publishing several dozen scholarly articles on snipe would be more than enough to convince discerning voters to do the right thing – after all, what other New Zealand bird can claim to be the alter-ego of a mythical night demon that was regarded with both terror and reverence by early Māori and modern muttonbirders (see The identity of the hakawai)?

I started my trek south from Cape Reinga convinced that I would soon be drinking a toast to tutukiwi and hakawai. But I had not counted on a giant animatronic grebe puppet, a rather scary-looking bird/flower hybrid costume that John Oliver wore on an episode of ‘Last Week Tonight’, or expensive pūteketeke billboards erected in London, Paris, Mumbai and Tokyo, pulling in hundreds of thousands of out-of-constituency grebely votes. Sigh.

And the rest

There was not much of note away from the lakes and rivers of this section, though we had some great New Zealand falcon | kārearea encounters (ten in total), and riflemen | tītitipounamu were common in beech forests along the Tīmaru River.

Lizards of Te Araroa Trail

In addition to counting the birds and feral mammals of Te Araroa Trail, I have also attempted to identify and count every lizard seen along the way. In the northern North Island, the main species was the introduced Australian plague skink. However, native skinks remain common in some parts of the South Island high country, with McCann’s skink the main species encountered so far.

Unfortunately, the pace that we are walking means that there is limited time to search for lizards in likely places near the trail, or to go out at night seeking nocturnal species. I have chosen to prioritise bird data collation and analysis, nocturnal bird counts, and blog-writing over nocturnal lizard surveys (other Te Araroa walkers prioritise sleep over all the above activities). However, an exception was our longest day on the trail (by time), when we didn’t reach Waitewaewae Hut until 11 pm. The two hours of night walking produced a rare record of a ngahere gecko from Tararua Forest Park.

I find the smaller species of skinks in the central and southern South Island a challenge to identify, and will be seeking opinions from more knowledgeable lizard experts on some of the skinks that I have photographed along Te Araroa Trail.

Bird species added since the previous section

Australian coot and kakī | black stilt.

Summary statistics for section seventeen

Cumulative totals for Te Araroa sections completed are given in parentheses.

• Days on the trail = 6 (109)
• Kilometres travelled and surveyed = 169.1 (2,802.8)
• eBird/Atlas checklists completed = 94 (1,558)
• Number of bird species = 44 (107)
• Total birds seen or heard = 3,396 (89,823)
• Most abundant species = silvereye | tauhou (336)
• Most abundant endemic species = black-billed gull | tarāpuka (283, mainly in a flock of 238 at the salmon farm just south of Twizel)
• Most frequent species = chaffinch | pahirini (53.4 % of checklists)
• Most frequent native species = silvereye | tauhou (48.9 % of checklists)
• Most frequent endemic species = grey warbler | riroriro (27.3 % of checklists), followed by New Zealand fantail | pīwakawaka (23.9 % of checklists, with only a single black fantail seen = 1.9 % of those seen)
• Endemic bird score = 39

Other blogs in this series

• Birds of Te Araroa 19 – Te Anau Highway to Bluff
• Birds of Te Araroa 18 – Wānaka to the Te Anau Highway
• Birds of Te Araroa 16 – Rakaia River to Twizel
• Birds of Te Araroa 15 – Boyle River to Rakaia River
• Birds of Te Araroa 14 – St Arnaud to Boyle Village
• Birds of Te Araroa 13 – Havelock to St Arnaud
• Birds of Te Araroa 12 – Cook Strait to Havelock
• Birds of Te Araroa 11 – Palmerston North to Wellington
• Birds of Te Araroa 10 – Whanganui to Palmerston North
• Birds of Te Araroa 9 – National Park to Whanganui
• Birds of Te Araroa 8 – Taumarunui to National Park
• Birds of Te Araroa 7 – Te Kūiti to Taumarunui
• Birds of Te Araroa 6 – Hamilton to Te Kūiti
• Birds of Te Araroa 5 – Auckland to Hamilton
• Birds of Te Araroa 4 – Whangārei Harbour to Auckland
• Birds of Te Araroa 3 – Kerikeri to Whangārei Harbour
• Birds of Te Araroa 2 – Kaitāia to Kerikeri
• Birds of Te Araroa 1 – Cape Reinga to Kaitāia
• Every Last Bird – the Birds of Te Araroa Trail

Related blogs

• Birds of the Great Walks of Aotearoa New Zealand