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Published: March 21st 2008
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New Zealand has a lot of introduced animals. Some were brought here for hunting, like rabbits and deer; some were brought for often-misguided attempts at pest control, like the little birds and ferrets; some were brought for nostalgic reasons, like swans; and some were brought for no good reason at all, like wallabies and frogs. Most of the introduced species are now pests to varying degrees, from the possums that munch their way through an estimated 20,000 tonnes of vegetation every night, to the stoats that kill up to 95% of kiwi chicks every year. But some are to all intents pretty harmless. One of those harmless species was the bird I was looking for this month, the chukar.
Chukar (or chukor, if you prefer) are a type of partridge native to the mountains of southern Asia and southeast Europe. The barren landscapes of the rabbit-devastated South Island hill-country proved to be ideal for them, and they have thrived since their initial introduction from India in the 1920s. The place most birders go to try and find them is Mt. John above Lake Tekapo. Lots of normal tourists go to Lake Tekapo because it is blue, a rather startling school-uniform blue caused by quantities of "glacial flour" (suspended particles) in the water. While there they generally walk up the track to the top of Mt. John where the Mt. John Observatory is, because there's not really much else to do in Tekapo. And we prefer to keep it from the tourists but Lake Pukaki further along the road is actually much bluer and more scenic, but shhhhh.
I'd gone to Tekapo last year to have a go at finding a chukar, but nothing much came of it. So now I was heading back for a second go. I was doing it the tourist way, on a shuttle bus, which was fun. First of all the bus was late. By an hour. Which in practice meant leaving an hour and a half past the scheduled time. Then we stopped for another half an hour for further repairs, despite which the gears would grind in a sickening fashion every time the stick was shifted. The air-conditioning was broken of course, which on this thirty degree day meant the inside of the bus was surely well over forty. Nobody wanted to go to sleep in case they didn't wake up again. On the plus side, where else can you get a bus ride with a complimentary sauna thrown in for free? Fortunately the main way of keeping cool for the German girl tourists was shedding their excess clothing, otherwise I would have been complaining. After a couple of hours the bus heading in the opposite direction (Queenstown to Christchurch) passed by so we pulled them over and stole their vehicle, leaving the Christchurch-bound to endure what we had come to affectionately know as The Death Bus. Somewhat ironically, on the return home the next day the bus going through to Queenstown was right on time but the one I was catching back to Christchurch was an hour late. Maybe its me.
Tekapo is a tiny little town. It has a petrol station, info centre, um...mini-golf course....ice rink...a strange abundance of ethnic restaurants...a jungle gym in the shape of an elephant...that's about it really. There is a campsite with rooms as well as spaces for tents and campervans, but I was going to sleep on top of the mountain so I could be up there at first light to look for chukar. Accordingly once off the bus I set off up the track. Mt. John isn't really all that high. From the lake to the top only takes about half an hour stiff hiking. Calling it a mountain may seem a bit misleading and in fact it is because its not really a mountain at all, just a massive glacial-shaped rock. However it certainly is higher than anything in the near vicinity, 1031 metres high at the summit (the lake sits at an altitude of about 720 metres). This of course means it also gets all the surrounding winds. Last time I was there the winds were at gale-force, making bird-watching just a little difficult. On this day the winds were negligible, but did I see any chukar? No I did not.
Rabbits rabbits everywhere. I swear if you fired a shotgun blindly backwards over your shoulder you would easily hit four or five bunnies. They seemed to be almost in plague proportions, much of the vegetation was gnawed down into the dust and the ground was carpeted in layers of rabbit droppings. A bit depressing. I tried wandering round the mountain looking for chukar on the move, and I tried sitting rock-like on various hillside vantage points for hours looking for chukar, but all I saw moving were rabbits. Figuring the early morning may well be more promising, before people had scared any chukar there away, I bedded down for the night under the overhang of a rock and went to sleep. I'm not entirely sure you're allowed to camp up there but there were no signs saying otherwise, so its all good.
In the morning I found more rabbits and more magpies and more skylarks. No chukar. I roamed the tracks for a bit, then sat down amongst the boulders on a slope and set up watch. No chukar, no chukar, fell asleep. Wait, what was that? Something that sounded like it may well be a chukar calling came wavering through the air from the opposite slope. Waiting, waiting...then like shadows they came drifting from the tussock, ghosting out of nowhere, stopping to scan the countryside for danger. There were sixteen of them, moving in a loose group until out in the open when they nervously spread out, fossicking for seeds and insects as they moved. Silly birds obviously thought I was just a rock so I watched them for about quarter of an hour through my binoculars, then a couple of approaching walkers scattered them back into the tussock and they disappeared.
The best birds are always the ones that make it hardest to see them...
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