The hunt for the secretive and haunting call of the Kōkako

Saturday, 28 August 2021

The scent of damp leaf-litter is thick in the air, already dense with the chattering of kākā, pīwakawaka and other native birds.

Two men wait with bated breath, listening for the elusive sound. They are about to record what they believe is a kōkako singing in the South Island, decades after the last authenticated sighting in 1967.

Bruce Reid has been looking for the South Island kōkako for five years now. He and fellow treasure-seeker Don Sullivan, who Bruce met while looking for the kōkako in the Murchison Valley, where there had a few years ago been “a bit of a kerfuffle about a kōkako sighting”.

“He and I decided to team up, and we’ve been doing searches ever since – pretty amateur-ish at first. We realised we had to be a bit more efficient and effective.”

He concedes it is possible that he and Don have got “a little carried away” – the pair have about 55 trail cameras set up in various forests and valleys around Tasman, and every six months have to service all of them – new batteries, new memory cards, and a treasure-hunt through all the photos snapped since they last checked.

While they service their trail cameras, they take the opportunity to (for lack of a better phrase) kill two birds with one stone, and play boombox recordings of North Island kōkako in locations with high reports of kōkako sightings (or hearings).

This is how their latest recording was made in the Heaphy.

A single hollow note, quite haunting

Don and Bruce were on the way back from servicing 22 of their trail cameras in the Heaphy. They always stop to play the boombox at a spot known as Flanigan’s Corner.

“There have been a lot of reported sightings in quite recent times [there]. What I do is play the North Island kōkako call … and hope I get a response.”

This time, he thought he was out of luck – no response.

“We moved on. I paused to take a photo a bit later – because the Aorere Valley just spreads out in front of you – and I could hear these incredible bell-like calls which stopped me in my tracks,” Bruce said.

“I just thought, ‘wow’. Then it moved into the ‘bong’ call, a single hollow note, quite haunting. It had to be a kōkako, or a bird imitating a kōkako very convincingly.”

This was when Bruce remembered he had a phone, capable of not only playing recorded birdsong, but potentially recording some of its own.

“I started filming, and couldn’t believe my luck when I got those two calls … Some people suggested it might have been kākā making the call, but if you listen, you can hear the kākā and robins chattering, but these two ‘bongs’ are quite distinct.”

Bruce said his were not the only recordings, but this one was, as far as he was concerned, the real deal.

“That’s the first personally conclusive kōkako I’ve heard. I’ve heard ones and thought ‘oh, is that it, it might be a kākā,’ but this one stopped me in my tracks.”

He still hasn’t checked all 22 cameras the pair were servicing on that trip, in fact he has one camera left to check

“It’s right in the area where those calls came from. It’ll be a few days’ work just to service. It’s just one camera, but maybe it’s the lucky one.”

Grey, no ghost

South Island Kōkako Trust general manager Inger Perkins acknowledges that “the grey ghost” is an evocative image, but she is less than enthusiastic about the moniker.

“Some of the people I connect to don’t like the idea of it being a ghost, but it is secretive and haunting.”

Inger said without photos it was hard to get any action on the real goal of the trust and all its volunteer kōkako-seekers: a conservation plan aimed at protecting the presumably critically endangered South Island kōkako.

The last confirmed sighting of the elusive South Island kōkako was in 1967. In 2008, 41 years after that sighting (which is also disputed by some), DOC declared the bird extinct, the last of its number assumed to have perished in a flood of rats, stoats, and other egg-eating mammals.

But the kōkako was not done singing.

Two years after it was declared extinct, the South Island Kōkako trust formed, giving itself five years to find definitive proof of the kōkako’s continued presence in the South Island, or give up the ghost. Almost 12 years later, the trust is still going strong and has a $10,000 reward waiting for the first person to provide proof of the elusive bird.

“They were still getting reports, so they couldn’t give up.”

In 2013, after multiple independent reports of the kōkako’s song ringing out in multiple places around the South Island, DOC moved the kōkako out of the extinct list and into the grey area it still occupies to this day: data deficient.

“The whole purpose of the search is to find it, so it can be conserved properly,” Inger says.

For all their searching, no one has managed to snap a photo of the kōkako, with its distinctive orange wattles (unlike the blue of its North Island cousins), but the trust has received almost 300 reports of sightings, and Inger estimates about two thirds of them are from people with a lot of bush experience.

“We try to work out what they’ve heard and seen, based on knowledge of the area … if there have been reports there before, what the vegetation is,” Inger says.

“Some of these sightings are possible, or even probable cases.”

It's not all low-tech or word-of-mouth, though.

“In the background, we’re really trying to bring science to bear on the search.”

They’re searching waterways for trace DNA, “a bit like trying to find Covid DNA in waste-water”, based on water samples from around the South Island.

“We haven’t caught the kōkako yet, but we have picked up kererū and grey warbler.”

Even the North Island kōkako, whose existence is well established, has proved elusive in North Island samples, so a lack of DNA in the South Island water samples hasn’t put any searchers off.

They are also working on acoustic analysis, running known and unknown bird calls through software to try to conclusively identify which bird sang each note recorded.

“We're not giving up. We keep getting reports like this … People out there are putting a lot of time and energy into this, and believe it is not too late. We just need that photo or video to confirm it.”

The lucky one

Bruce hopes his audio recording, which he has sent off for analysis, is confirmed to be what he thinks it is, but acknowledges that without a photo or video, it can be hard to build momentum.

Years of searching, with little to show for it, can get even the most dedicated kōkako-seeker down.

“That [recording] counts for a lot. It keeps you focused on the job, rather than losing heart because you're not getting the result you maybe want,” Bruce says.

“It does take over your life a little bit.”

The wildlife Bruce and Don have captured on the trail cameras they service is a wonder in its own right, even without the kōkako. The cameras are set up facing a simple lure – an ice-cream container which collects rainwater and becomes a mini watering-hole for the locals.

“The one near Saxon Point was quite amazing with what it hit on it. Not kōkako yet, but kiwi, lots of deer, even a takahe,” Bruce says.

Not only that, but over the five years he and Don have been searching, they have been recording almost in real-time the effects of DOC pest control programmes.

“From the early cameras we put out two years ago, we're not seeing anywhere near the same number of rats or mice – because they did a 1080 drop, and it’s amazing to see the difference,” he says.

“That one camera at Saxon, I didn’t see a single rodent. I keep feeding that data to DOC. It definitely has had an effect.”

But the kōkako, if it is out there, needs more than the occasional poison drop, and so do the other birds that are out there for sure, Bruce says.

“We’ve got this precious birdlife, the kākā, and I believe the kōkako, and they need more protection than just 1080 drops – unless it’s done every year.”

Meanwhile, the hunt for the kōkako continues.