Frank Film: Searching for New Zealand’s Most Elusive Bird

Behind the sound of footsteps, the chatter of silver eyes and the click of the weka, there is silence. Standing in a grove of old beeches, ferns and thorny leaves in a ravine, ornithologist Rhys Buckingham has been listening to the forest for over 40 years.

Silence again.

Buckingham has been on the South Island kōkako trail since 1977. That year, while walking to the head of Lake Monowai in Fiordland, in the stillness of dusk, he heard “an ethereal bell toll”.

“I was almost hypnotized by that beautiful call,” he tells Frank Film. “It’s like a cathedral bell or a church bell, constantly ringing. Once you hear this amazing call of the South Island kōkako, it would be hard to stop looking for it.”

At 75, Buckingham is now retired, living in Māpua on the South Island’s Tasman Bay. But he still makes repeated expeditions into the deep forests of Te Waipounamu, searching for evidence of a bird now known as the “gray ghost”. South Island kōkako, he says, must be on its way. The number of predators is increasing. Its habit of hopping or bounding along the forest makes it even more vulnerable. A recording on a motion sensor video camera, one of 21 installed in the area, shows a small, hunched figure. “Damn rat,” he mutters.

But he still has confidence. Buckingham had several sightings of the South Island kokako, including at Stewart Island in 1984 and then near the Nelson Lakes in 1996. In 2020 he was manning a camera near this gully when he heard two calls identical to those of the North Island kokako . “What was absolutely and truly remarkable is that after these wonderful calls, the Tūī above me, who had been making normal calls until then, started raising alarms. One of the birds began to copy one of the kōkako calls. It was a dramatic change.”

Now, he looks around the still forest.

“There’s a bird here somewhere.”

Larger than a tūī, smaller than a kererū, the South Island kōkako with its distinctive orange is – or was – part of an ancient family of birds that includes the now-extinct Huia, the North and South Island and the North Island. kōkako, which has come back from the brink of extinction in recent decades. It once inhabited the forests on both sides of the Southern Alps, in the Stewart

Island and in parts of Otago and Southland, but even in the late 1800s numbers seemed to be dwindling.

In 2007, after 40 years of unaccepted sightings, it was declared extinct, but a sighting that year was later accepted by the Ornithological Society, and in 2013 its status was reclassified to ‘Data Deficient’. The South Island Kōkako Trust, which Buckingham co-founded in 2010, is now offering a $10,000 reward for definitive evidence that the bird exists. Last year, the global conservation movement Re:wild added the South Island kōkako to its list of 25 most wanted lost species.

Further glimpses and descriptions of its melancholic, echo-ey call have kept the notoriously secretive bird in the public imagination.

But the evidence remains tantalizingly elusive. A slide taken near Haast in the 1950s or 1960s is now lost to history. A kokako-like feather found on Stewart Island in 1986 was missing for decades before turning up, uncatalogued, in a folder at Te Papa Tongarewa. a 20-second recording believed to be two kōkako taken near Charleston in 1998 was destroyed in a fire. “An absolute tragedy,” says Buckingham.

In Searching for New Zealand’s Most Elusive Bird, Frank Film includes footage shot by filmmaker Gerard Smyth in 2001 with Buckingham and former Wildlife Service ranger Ron Nilsson in Granville Forest between Greymouth and Reefton . In the video, Nilsson, who died last year, plays a recording of North Island kōkako. Within seconds a bird responds. Nilsson freezes in intense concentration. It was “very, very interesting,” Buckingham says now. Was it a copycat song from a kākā, bellbird or tūī? “It might have been a response from kōkako,” he says.

Such near-close encounters – and his hope that future generations will hear this “amazing call” in its natural habitat – keep him returning to the remote reaches of the South Island bush.

“I am sustained by these moments when the bird decides to reveal itself. Usually when I’m at the point of thinking, I give up – the bird calls. I’m stuck for another five years.”

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