This week, during a visit to the Wellington zoo, I had a realisation about myself. No, it’s not that I wish to strip off all my clothes and live out my days swinging nude from the trees like a spider monkey, although that does sound great. It’s that after spending time on and off in Aotearoa the last couple of years (due to lesbian love), I have now fully become entrenched in the New Zealand mindset.
Walking around the zoo lesbianly, we checked out the extremely cute otters, met the adorable lemurs, raised our eyebrows at the capuchins (not because we were surprised to see them at a zoo, it’s a sign of friendliness) and encountered all sorts of beautiful creatures. But as it turns out, the animal I was personally most excited to see, the one that made me gasp out loud upon entering its habitat? The one I made sure to return to before leaving?
It wasn’t a giraffe, or a snow leopard, or a chimpanzee. It was … a parrot.
But! Not just ANY parrot. It was a kea! Kea are large native olive-green parrots, part of the same family as the kākāpō, its more famous relative. They are some of the smartest birds in the world (smarter than a crow!) and when they spread their wings they reveal a bright orange underside, as one showed me when it flew over my head, making me gasp with joy.
Looking up at it, my mouth agape, I realised – the New Zealanders have finally bloody done it. They’ve successfully turned me into one of them.
One thing they don’t tell you is that new zealanders absolutely love talking about their birds. Every time I’ve been at a gathering of three or more people, they have started talking about the birds at some point
— Bec Shaw (@Brocklesnitch) November 14, 2021
I tweeted the above statement in 2021. The obsession with birds was one of the earliest things I noticed in Aotearoa, and it has remained a long-running theme. If you stand in one spot long enough in Wellington, at some point someone nearby will start talking about birds.
Everyone talks about them, seemingly across all parameters. Old, young, friends, strangers, radio hosts, people at cafes, your Uber driver. Did you hear there’s a kārearea family nesting in Mt Vic? Do you know a tūī has two voice boxes? Did you know there’s a goth version of a pīwakawaka, and it’s called a “dark morph”, as if it’s a teeny tiny round bird supervillain? Pixar please call me.
It seems like everyone in Wellington has some kind of bird madness (not to be mistaken for bird flu), and I know now that I am infected.
I’ve always loved Australian birds, and I know lots of people do (especially noticeable during the Guardian Bird of the Year poll that stirs up all the bird people). But there’s something about the broadness of the audience here, the natural way bird chat is incorporated into everyday life, and the genuine passion shared by everyone that has opened my eyes a little bit wider – making it all the easier to see how cool birds are.
The bird obsession may be partly because, as a kiwi friend gently put it, there are very few land mammals, some insects – but a huge diverse wealth of special birds. It’s what they have, and they love to talk about it.
Not to be hack, but I can’t talk about birds without at least quickly mentioning the bees before I wrap up. Don’t worry, I am not about to spill on some weird New Zealand sex facts, I literally mean the bees. Bumblebees! (which I’ve since discovered are an introduced species and also exist in Tasmania).
All bees are important and nice, but before seeing my first bumblebee, I could never grasp why my girlfriend and her friends all talked with reverence about them. It’s because I had no idea that they are some of the cutest creatures on Earth. Bumblebees are much larger than honeybees, and very round, and really fuzzy. They are almost cartoon-like. Pixar, call me.
I think this evolution of me becoming a bird woman has been a rare example of positive peer pressure. We generally only hear about peer pressure when it’s bad, like getting someone into smoking, or being heterosexual (just joking) (or am I?). No parent is like “Oh no, Timothy has been peer pressured into doing his chores again!”
Decades after my teen years, I have now been peer pressured. In a good way. By an entire country’s population. It’s been a subtle peer pressure, bringing me along inch by inch with every random conversation I hear people having about birds, and how great the birds are. Or maybe it’s more like bird propaganda, worming its way into my psyche. The early bird talk gets the worm psyche, as they say.
Whatever you want to call it, it worked. I am now someone who gasps at birds, who runs to the window when someone points out an endangered bird. I’m someone who buys bird calendars and Googles interesting bird facts. In fact, I’m someone who writes an entire article about how much I love birds – and I couldn’t be happier.
• Rebecca Shaw is a writer based in Sydney
