Where Cuckoos Call (10 page)

Spring arrived, bringing better things, as if nature was trying to make up for all the bad things that had happened over winter. The first was the return of Bigmouth.

I suppose I should have been angry with her. I had cared for her like a mother cares for a child. Yet she was the one who’d led me to Vanuatu and all the awful things that had come from that. The consequence of taking her out of a nest was to be shamed in front of the whole country. Still, I bore no grudges; in fact, quite the opposite—I was thrilled to see her.

She arrived one dull, windy afternoon and sat on a branch outside Treetops, crying softly. When I let her inside, I found that she was breathing with her beak open as if she was exhausted. Her feathers were a mess and I wondered if somewhere between Lopevi and here she had been in a storm.

I wanted to feed her and searched my mind for some place where I could find food. There seemed to be nothing. Then I remembered a dead hedgehog I’d seen on the beach. I grabbed a plastic bag and sprinted along the beach. ‘Yes!’ I hissed as I turned over the carcass. ‘This is perfect.’ The thing was crawling with maggots. I rolled it into the bag and returned to Treetops.

Bigmouth was still where I had left her. It was half an hour before she ate anything, and even then she took only two.

Three days later she was back to normal. She spent the time in between entirely in the tree hut. I don’t know what would have happened to her if she’d had to look after herself. Though, perhaps she’s one of those animals that can survive no matter what. The last time I’d seen her, she was living amongst the poisonous gases and falling ash of a volcano.

The next piece of good news was totally unexpected. At
the beginning of October, Tiny-M came back. At first I didn’t recognise her, she looked so different. She was wearing her breeding dress—and what a dress it was. Her boring white and grey was now charcoal and red, with yellow-tipped feathers. She looked magnificent.

I was so happy to have her back. Yet, when I thought about it, I also felt a little sad. She might have looked beautiful, but she was one messed-up bird. Red-necked phalaropes breed in the northern hemisphere, and here she was in the south all dressed up to breed, but with no one to breed with. Now, she seemed doomed to fly back and forth over the equator, always out of phase with the rest of her species: looking good when the others were drab, and drab when they looked good.

At about that time, Bigmouth mated for the first time. The cuckoos had been calling in the trees for several days. From what I could tell, it sounded like three males were interested in her. (Maybe it was the fancy leg band that attracted them.) She led them on for several days before selecting Mr Right. While Bigmouth knew that a human lived in the tree, the male had no idea, and so I became one of the few people in the world to see shining cuckoos mate. I found it embarrassing. At the start I lifted my camera to film it, and then felt that that wasn’t right, so I left them alone.

Over the next few days I followed her for hours, hoping to see her lay in a warbler’s nest. That, too, has been seen only a few times. It was not to be. I now know that they usually lay at dawn when the warbler leaves for the first feed of the day. I was simply not getting up early enough. I looked for the nest containing her egg, again without success. Probably just as well or I would have been tempted to save the warbler chick and start the whole business over again.

Peg spent most of these days with me down at Treetops. It was obvious that her life was coming to a close. She was now
fifteen and that’s old for a dog. Lots of people say they love dogs or cats or some other animal. That sort of love doesn’t seem to cover what I felt for Peg. Throughout all the things that had happened in that year, she’d never once complained, never criticised, and never blamed. She’d always greet me with a happy smile and a waggling tail. Sometimes when we were walking I would think that she had gone missing and I’d call her. She would nudge my leg, showing that she was right next to me all the time. Then she’d give me a look that said, ‘I’m right here, you silly chump. Do you think I would ever leave you?’

I changed things to help her cope better. We walked more slowly than we had before. I now took my lunch down to Treetops, to cut down on the number of trips to and fro. If she was asleep when I was ready to leave, I would read some more until she was awake. They were only little things compared to what she did for me.

My birthday came around again and I became a teenager. I didn’t notice any difference except there was no flashy gift that year. I got some clothes from Mum and a schoolbag from Dad, which I knew he hadn’t bought. Not that things between Dad and me were bad; they were not. He was on some new medication and there could be two or three days on end when he seemed OK. But sooner or later something would annoy him, and you soon knew that the sickness was still there. The good times were better, and the bad times were worse. Sometimes they were so bad that he even became physically ill with breathing problems, hot and cold spells, and the like.

The gift of a schoolbag reminded me that in a few months I would be off to boarding school. I didn’t want to go. There had been a lot on the news about bullying in schools, and how it
was often the clever students who got picked on. I thought that I was probably in that group, so a schoolbag was not high on my list of hoped-for presents.

When the mail arrived I found that Cole had sent me
The Lord of the Rings
trilogy—which was high on my list—and that made me feel much better. It was the first contact from Cole since the hoax, and I was relieved to find that he hadn’t abandoned me completely.

Then Sarah-Lee sent me an email. We communicated about once a week, just telling each other what was happening. They were no big deal, but I found myself looking forward to receiving hers and sending mine. Her birthday email was much the same as the others, except for the end:

Mom and Dad are coming to New Zealand for a conference in a couple of months and I’m hoping they’ll let me skip school and come with them. That’ll be sometime before Christmas. I do want to see you again. I’ll keep you posted on what’s happening.

Lots of love,

Sarah-Lee

I know many people sign off with ‘lots of love’ without meaning too much. But Sarah-Lee had not done it before. That, and the possibility of seeing her again, gave me a funny feeling inside.

My previous birthday—when I’d turned twelve—had got worse as the day progressed, with the arrival of the bikers and Dad’s reaction to Bigmouth. My thirteenth was exactly the opposite. In the morning, after the gift from Dad, I rated it a one out of ten. Cole’s gift and Sarah-Lee’s email lifted it to five. But by the end of the day it was up to ten—the highest ever.

So, what happened in the afternoon to cause such a big change? Oh, only that a small bird flew into our bay. It was a male red-necked phalarope, and, like Tiny-M, he too was all dressed up to breed.

It was that nosey Bigmouth who pointed him out to me. She put on her come-and-look-at-this dance to lead me down to the edge of the estuary near Treetops. At first I thought it was Tiny-M and that somehow she had lost some of her feathers, because she looked a lot plainer. That’s when Tiny-M herself flew in and began to show interest. It was the first hint that something special was happening.

I rushed back to Treetops to get the camera. I set it onto movie so that if anything happened I could record it all. When I got back to the birds, something was definitely happening. I don’t know if they’d ever met before, but they sure got friendly very quickly. I recorded it all.

Later, when I was sitting in Treetops, I began to realise the importance of what was happening. These birds had never before bred in the southern hemisphere. They were northern birds. If they successfully bred down here, then I felt sure they would continue to do so. That would isolate them from the northern ones, and isolation can create new species.

This was a big event. It was like finding a new comet, or the cure for a disease, or really finding that Lapita people had been to New Zealand. I understood then that this could be my miracle. This could save the birds and Mansfield Bay. Yet, I also knew that it would not be easy. First Tiny-M had to lay the eggs, and then the male had to hatch them. Plus I had to find some way of using this information without breaking my promise to Dad.

I would record everything and tell no one. I would worry about what to do with it later. There would be no Professor Waghorn, or anyone else, messing with my life this time.

Tiny-M made a nest and laid four eggs. Then T-Boy (that’s the phalarope male) started sitting on them. However, Tiny-M had made a bad choice of site for her nest. It was on the other side of the estuary: a hollow in the ground that she had lined with leaves and grass stalks. It was well camouflaged, so it was unlikely that the harriers or gulls would find it. But the mammals would. They hunt by smell and T-Boy would have just the right scent for them. I don’t set traps on that side of the estuary, and so there were plenty of mammals that could make a meal of those eggs: rats, stoats, hedgehogs, weasels, and even possums. It was the worst possible place to nest.

I could see the nest from Treetops using my binoculars. Each morning I arrived expecting to see it abandoned. Surprisingly, it lasted almost two weeks. The four eggs must have been just about ready to hatch. I don’t know what animal got them in the end. When I took a closer look, there were mammal tracks all over the place. It looked like lots of them had gathered for the feast. I also found enough feathers to think that they might have got T-Boy. He would have tried to defend the nest against the invaders, but he would’ve been no match for their teeth.

I photographed it all, not knowing whether the whole thing was over or not. However, later in the day, when the tide was out, I saw the pair of them feeding on the sandbank. T-Boy looked very much alive, even though he had lost all of his tail feathers.

Phalaropes have a strange relationship. While the male had been sitting on the nest, Tiny-M had ignored him. Now that the eggs had gone, they were the best of mates again. I felt that they must communicate in a lot of ways other than the
occasional
peep, peep
that I could hear. That was yet another thing to be investigated by the Mansfield Research Institute.

Tiny-M’s second nest was in a more sensible place. It was on the estuary side of the sand spit, in amongst the spinifex. My only concern was that it had flooded there during the cyclone earlier in the year. However, we don’t get cyclones before Christmas so she was probably all right. She laid her four eggs and left the male to get on with it. Again, I recorded it all.

I looked after that nest more than any nest ever. I surrounded it with boxes of Fenn traps baited with delicious smells: rotten eggs, canned cat food, dead possum meat. I dug ditches to trap the hedgehogs and put possum bait stations in the trees. I was going to protect those eggs, even if it killed me.

Just when I thought everything was turning out right, the emails began again. The threats were much the same, except more violent. And now there was a new bit:

ur dogs wont worry us dis time bird boy

we gonna fix them

then we gonna fix you

c u in 17 daze bird boy

lookin 4wd 2 it

Who knows what they would do to the dogs? I thought of guns, electric zappers and poison, but there were probably other ways. One thing I knew for sure, I couldn’t take this sort of thing every day. It was time to do something about it.

I started at a website that had lots of advice about Internet safety. There I learned that what the bikers were doing is called cyber-stalking and is illegal. The site also said that it was my responsibility to take action. The first thing was to contact their
Internet service provider, which I could get from something called a header file. That proved to be a dead end: the emails were coming from different hotmail addresses and the header file had no useful information. If I wanted to go further, I would need to contact the police. That’s when I decided to tell my parents.

They were shocked. Dad got angry. ‘Why didn’t you tell us about this?’ he shouted. ‘I would have sorted them out.’

‘I didn’t think you’d want to know,’ I said, meekly.

Mum stepped in before he could react to that. ‘Ben, we always want to know if you’re in trouble. That’s what parents are for.’

‘I’m contacting Dave Skeat,’ said Dad. ‘These thugs aren’t going to get away with this.’ Dave Skeat was the local policeman. He’d been to our place several times in the past when we’d had troubles with unwanted visitors.

A couple of days later Constable Skeat arrived and listened to my story. I gave him copies of all the emails and descriptions of the bikes and the bikers, as much as I’d ever seen of them.

He advised me to forward the emails to him without opening them. If the bikers came back I was to let him know immediately.

It is difficult to forward an email without opening it. And of course, when it was opened, I found it hard not to read what was in it. So, the threats continued and I kept being reminded of how many days I had to go.

When Dave Skeat got back to us, he said that the messages had been traced to an Internet café in Auckland. The owner said she had an idea who they might be and would keep an eye out for them. Dave said that it was probably best that I change my email address as that was sure to stop them. So, I changed my address and the emails stopped. But my worries didn’t go away, because I still knew when the bikers were coming
and I couldn’t help but count down to the date.

I told Cole about the threats. While I knew he couldn’t do anything about them, they had become such a major part of my life that I felt he should know.

His reply came a couple of nights later.

Kia ora Ben,

Why did the archaeologist cry?

Because he lost his mummy.

Thanks for your email and new address.

It’s real bad that you are being bullied by these bikers. But you are doing the right thing – tell people and keep on telling them. When you find out who they are, let me know. I would like to have a little chat with them.

Sorry I haven’t written lately. Like you, I’ve had other things on my mind and I wanted to have something good to say. Well, now I have. The All Black team to tour Europe after Christmas was announced today and I’m in it.

The GOAL has been achieved.

Yippee and yahoo! You have no idea how great it feels. It took eighteen years, but I did it.

There was a time, a couple of months back, when I thought it would never happen. The hammering I took from the media almost made me give up. I know you have suffered the same over the Lapita thing.

Yet, maybe troubles like this can make us stronger, and more determined to be successful. It did with me
eventually, and I hope it works for you. Don’t give up, and keep on writing.

Say, when is the best time to buy a cuckoo?

When it’s going cheep.

Ka kite,

Cole

While T-Boy was sitting on that second lot of eggs, I spent all my days down on the spit, either in Treetops or on the sand if it was sunny. I’d sit and read, looking up every few pages to see if everything was OK.

One afternoon I was watching Tiny-M feeding on the mud flats when I was surprised by a voice.

‘What you got there?’ It was Dad. During his good times he had taken to walking along the beach, though he had never got this far before.

I thought for a while before answering. Should I tell him? If I was ever to use the information I was gathering, sooner or later I would need his permission. Yes, I decided, this was the time to start the process.

‘It’s a red-necked phalarope,’ I said.

‘Is it?’ He studied it for a while. ‘My word, yes it is. And in its breeding plumage. You know I had one of these when I was young. It flew in early in the season looking just like that. All season I hoped that a male would come along and mate with it. Of course one never did—it was a silly hope.’

‘The male’s over there,’ I said in a matter-of-fact way. ‘Sitting on the nest.’

‘You’re kidding me? You’ve got a phalarope nest?’

‘Come and have a look.’

While T-Boy was not as tame as Tiny-M, we could still get within a few metres of the nest without him getting upset. We sat in the sand and watched.

‘How many eggs has he got?’ Dad whispered.

‘Four. He’s been sitting on them for twelve days. Only six to go.’

‘Gee, Ben. If these hatch it will be really something.’

‘I know.’

‘It could lead to a new species.’

‘I know.’

‘What’s the scientific name for them?’

‘
Phalaropus lobatus
.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. I used to know all that stuff once.’ He sat thinking for a while. ‘What do you think the new species should be called?’

I looked at him. He had a twinkle in his eyes. It was a twinkle that I remembered from a long time ago. That twinkle was Real Dad.

‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘What do you think?’

‘How about
Phalaropus mansfieldus
?’

‘Oh no, Dad, that’s sexist. It would have to be
Phalaropus personsfieldus
.’

‘Or
Phalaropus unsexedfieldus
.’

‘I know.
Phalaropus unsexedpaddockus
.’

‘
Phalaropus whocareswhatthesexispaddockus
.’

And so we went on, getting sillier and sillier, until we agreed on a name. I still treasure that afternoon. It more than made up for the birthday schoolbag.