Authors: Gerald Durrell
Stan let us through the impressively padlocked gate and then along a narrow pathway that meandered through the tussocky grass along the cliff edge. Far below us the sea was steel grey, wrinkled
and crumpled by the wind, and skimming its surface we could see hosts of sea birds – gulls, skuas, various species of cormorant. Gradually the path started to wind up towards the high ground
of the Head, and the tussocks of grass grew larger, but were interspersed with areas of quite short turf. Then Stan came to a standstill and pointed: to one side of the path, not many yards away,
squatted what at first sight looked like a great ball of fluff. Closer inspection proved this to be a baby albatross, squatting regally on the haphazard collection of twigs that a royal albatross
fondly imagines to be a nest. It was about the size of a rotund turkey, covered with fine, snow-white down that showed off to advantage its great, dark eyes and banana-yellow beak. It squatted
dumpily in its nest and glared at us like an indignant powder-puff. As we got closer to him, however, he started to get uneasy and, with a tremendous effort, hoisted himself on to his great, flat
feet, raised his wings over his back, and started to clatter his beak at us like a castanet. We had to judge our distance very carefully when we were filming and photographing him, for if we had
got too close, he would have regurgitated a stream of black, evil-smelling oil over both us and his impeccable white shirt front, for this is the baby albatross’s only means of defence.
Presently we left this baby in peace and moved further up the path, where we found another nest on a flat piece of turf under the lee of a tumble of rocks. The baby in this nest was a much more
phlegmatic character than the previous one, and merely glanced at us briefly before continuing with the difficult task he had set himself for the day. The parent birds, in building the nest, had
scattered a lot of twigs over quite a large area around it, and the baby was amusing himself by seeing how far he could stretch out, grab a twig and add it to the nest, without actually getting up,
He had obviously been at the job for some time, for the area immediately round the nest was bare of twigs and he was having to stretch out further and further, sometimes in danger of rolling out of
the nest like a down-covered football.
I lay down on the turf just out of spitting range and watched his earnest nest-building endeavours, but soon the supply of twigs ran out and, after he had shuffled round and round in the nest to
make sure there were no more twigs he could reach, he squatted there and stared into the middle distance, as if meditating some grave and important matter I found a fairly lengthy twig and,
hitching myself forward cautiously, I held it out to him. For a moment he fixed me with a penetrating stare, and then he leant forward and took the twig delicately in his beak with much the same
air as a female member of the aristocracy would receive a somewhat battered bouquet from a snotty-nosed village child. He held it in his beak for a moment and then carefully tucked it in one side
of the nest that he obviously thought showed signs of disrepair. Encouraged by his condescension I found another twig, hitched myself still closer and offered him that. He took it immediately and
became quite animated. First he stuck it in one side of the nest, then he decided it did not look right there, so he pulled it out and stuck it somewhere else. After two or three tries he was
satisfied and then he looked at me expectantly: obviously, repulsive though I might appear, as a twig collector I had my points. Within ten minutes he had added several more twigs to his nest and
had allowed me to lie within a couple of feet of him without spitting in my eye. Within half an hour we were bosom pals and he was even allowing me to re-arrange one or two twigs for him that he
had got slightly muddled with (one he had stuck under his wing by mistake). As I watched this circular, fluff-covered chick working so intently at his nest repairing, it seemed incredible that one
day he would be a handsome white bird with black wings and a yellow beak, floating effortlessly over the waves on a ten-and-a-half foot wingspan. In nine years’ time, when he (or was it a
she?) had reached maturity, a mate would be found and they would come back to Taiaroa Head to build their nest and rear their own fluff-covered chick. Both the parents would sit on the egg and both
would help in the task of caring for the baby; then, when the chick was old enough to fend for itself, they would fly off to sea, to return two years later to repeat the performance. The royal
albatross pairs for life and the oldest one in the colony is thirty-five, but the slow rate of reaching maturity, the long incubation (eleven weeks, one of the longest of any bird), and the fact
that they have only one chick every two years, means that to build up an Albatross colony is an extremely slow process and needs a lot of patience.
As we took our reluctant leave of the chicks and made our way down the path, we saw one of the parent birds, far out on the horizon, floating like a black and white cross over the grey sea,
swooping and gliding on the air currents as smoothly as a stone skims on ice, with never a single wing-beat, just a gentle inclination of the body to make the best use of whatever air current
happened to catch the broad wings. We stood and watched this effortless flight until the bird was so far away that it was out of range of even our binoculars, and then, saluting the chicks once
more, we left the sanctuary.
Next we drove down the coast of the peninsula to a place that Stan said was one of the favourite breeding grounds for the yellow-eyed penguin. This is one of the most beautiful of the penguin
family and at one time was quite common along certain areas of suitable coast, but, wherever man appeared, the penguin suffered. Yellow‑eyes like to nest inland, in the forest or scrub, the
nest being placed under the shelter of a log or some rocks and consisting of a comfortable platform of twigs and coarse grass. But the human beings cut down the forest and scrub to make grassland
for their precious sheep, depriving the penguin in many places of its natural nesting habitat, and so it started to decline. Add to this that the farmers and other people would raid the nests,
break the eggs and kill the defenseless parent birds, and you have, in miniature the sort of thing that is happening all over the world to hundreds of harmless species of birds, mammals and
reptiles. The area that Stan took us to was a large sheep farm, one of whose borders was formed by the high cliffs of the peninsula, but in this particular area there were many valleys sloping down
to the beach, valleys thickly covered with just the sort of scrub that the penguins liked to nest in. The farmer (who must surely be one of the most enlightened in New Zealand) had agreed that
these valleys should remain untouched so that they formed a sanctuary for the birds and had agreed too – since he was on the spot – to be acting, unpaid warden of the area. Before this
sensible and humane gesture was made the yellow-eye population had dropped alarmingly to only a few hundred birds; after a few years of this protection the population had crept up and now numbered
a couple of thousand. Stan was a bit worried that we might not see any of the birds, since the breeding season was over and the yellow-eyes spent most of their time out at sea, fishing, but we made
our way down one of the valleys and eventually found ourselves on a great stretch of beach, liberally sprinkled with sea-smoothed rocks draped in shawls of green seaweed. We picked our way through
the boulders, keeping a sharp lookout both up the valleys and out to sea, for we had no means of knowing where the penguins would be. Half an hour passed and we had seen nothing except a few gulls
and cormorants flying past, and I began to think that, for the first time in New Zealand, we were going to be unlucky in our search for something we wanted to film. Then Stan, standing up on a
pinnacle of rock, suddenly pointed out to sea.
‘There’s one,’ he said triumphantly, ‘and he’s swimming inshore.’
Brian and I hurriedly scrambled up the slippery slope of rock to join him.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Brian in a self-satisfied manner, ‘he should land about fifty yards from here.’
I peered hopefully out to sea, but my eyes were no match for those of Brian and Stan, and until I used my binoculars I could not see a thing. Then all I could see was the head which, at that
distance, looked like a small bundle of straw floating rapidly along the surface of the water towards the shore.
We waited patiently on the rock until the penguin reached the shallow water and waddled ashore, as Brian had predicted, some fifty yards away from where we were. He trundled up the beach with
that earnest, flat-footed air that penguins adopt and, acting on Sam’s advice, we let him get up to the top of the small cliff leading to the valley before trying to intercept him. When he
had crossed the beach he reached the tumble of great rocks and smaller boulders that formed the small ‘cliff’ at the top of which the grass and bushes started and sloped gently upwards.
Instead of picking his way through these rocks, as I imagined he would, he paused in front of the first one, gathered himself for the effort and then jumped on top of it, where he stood swaying in
a triumphant but slightly intoxicated manner. Then he measured the distance between the rock he was standing on and the next one and leapt once again, landing on it more by good luck than good
judgment. So he progressed from rock to rock in a series of wild leaps; occasionally he would misjudge the distance, land on the rock, stand swaying for a moment, his wings outstretched to try and
keep his balance, and would then slide gracefully down the side of the rock and out of sight. Presently he would reappear, clambering manfully up on to the rocks again, to repeat the performance.
Why he chose this complicated and exhausting method of obtaining his goal I have no idea, for by picking his way between the rocks he could have obtained his objective much more quickly and in an
infinitely more dignified manner. He was by now sufficiently far from the sea that, even if he did notice us, he would not have time enough to escape, so I made my way to the top of the cliff and
crawled through the undergrowth on all fours until I came to the spot where I thought he would finally appear. Here I lay down in the grass and endeavoured to look as much like a piece of
vegetation as possible. I had calculated that he would reach the small cliff top some twenty feet from where I was lying.
I was lying there, staring eagerly at the spot at which I thought he would appear, and making plans as to the best way to catch him so that we could take our close-up shots of him, when his head
appeared over a tuft of grass some four feet away. I am not quite sure which one of us was the most surprised. The penguin glared at me in a disbelieving fashion and I gaped at him open-mouthed
for, up until then, I had only seen him at a distance and I had not realised how attractive he would be. The feathers on the top of his head were bright yellow, each feather with a central black
streak; a patch round his eye, which then formed a band right round the back of his head to the other eye, was a brilliant sulphur yellow; his beak was brownish with slate blue patches and his eyes
were a pale lemon yellow. I lay as still as I could and hoped that he would mistake me for a rock or a bush, although I felt the chances were slight. However, the yellow-eye stared at me for a
time, obviously suspicious, twisting his head this way and that to see if I looked any different from different angles, and at length decided that I must be some curious sort of flotsam of a
harmless nature. With one final effort he hauled himself over the rim of the cliff and stood there panting, flapping his wings up and down. I could see now that his back was a pale smoke blue and
his flippers were blackish, neatly rimmed with yellow, while his shirt front gleamed a pure and unsullied white, so brilliant that it would have made a detergent manufacturer burst into tears of
joy. His large, rather flat feet were pinkish, armed with exceptionally large brown claws, which I supposed he needed to help him in his perambulations up and down the cliff. After he had paused
long enough to gain his breath, he turned round and started to waddle up the valley with an air of determination. I rose silently to my feet,overtook him in a couple of quick steps and grabbed. I
was careful to get one hand round the back of his neck, for what I had seen of his beak led me to believe that it was not put there just for ornament. As I grabbed him he twisted his head round and
stared up at me in horror, at the same time uttering a startled squawk. Talking to him soothingly, I bundled his fat body under my arm and then – still keeping a firm grip on his neck –
made my way down to where the others were waiting for me on the beach. After my capture had been duly admired and all the still photographs we wanted of him taken, we then hoped we would get some
co-operation from him in the filming. We had the shots of him coming out of the sea and some long shots of him climbing the cliff, but what we wanted now were some close-up shots of him
boulder-hopping. To our complete surprise, he behaved perfectly. We put him down on the sand within a few feet of the tumble of boulders and he started off towards them determinedly. For five
minutes or so we filmed him leaping from boulder to boulder with what he obviously imagined to be a chamois-like grace, occasionally tripping and falling on his face or toppling over backwards and
disappearing into a crevice with wild flapping of flippers. When we had all the material we wanted we decided that it would be a shame – after his original laborious ascent of the cliff
– that he should have to do it all over again because of us, so I picked him up and carried him a fair distance up the valley in the direction in which he had been originally heading. I put
him down on the grass and he looked up at me enquiringly; I patted his bottom encouragingly and he waddled a few uncertain paces forward and then looked back again, as if wondering whether it was
worth going any further if I was going to chase and catch him again, but as I remained quite still he decided that perhaps now he was safe, and disappeared into the long undergrowth at a brisk
trot, tripping daintily over the grass tussocks, and soon disappeared from sight. As I watched him go I wondered how anyone could be so callous as to kill these beautiful and harmless birds, or
even rob their nesting sites, but at least there was one consolation: here, on this strip of wild coast with the gentle, tree-filled valleys running up from the sea, they were safe.