Strange days have found us by Keith Woodley

Keith Woodley has been resident manager at the Pūkorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre for 27 years. He is the author of Godwits: Long-haul champions and Shorebirds of New Zealand: Sharing the margins.
 
What pandemic? The weather was benign. Across the paddocks to the north west, the bulky Hunua Ranges under a cloudless sky: across the bay to the east, the ridges of the Coromandel. A wheeling harrier overhead, and above the shoreline flocks of oystercatchers commuting to their high tide roost on the shell bank. Hard to countenance that, away from this idyll, the world was plunging into turmoil. 
My bubble was a big one: the Shorebird Centre and its grounds and the long strip of coastal reserve opposite. On one of my walks there were two figures in the landscape, about half a kilometre away. Just two weeks earlier, it had been common enough as people used the trail system between the bird hides. Now the first thought, though fleeting: who are these intruders into my space?

Familiar features were encountered in a new context. The pukekos normally resident around the pond and wider centre grounds, were now fossicking at the front steps. A white-faced heron took to standing on the deck peering in through the ranch slider. This I took to be neighbourhood watch.
Quite new was the scene at the eastern end of the Kopu bridge outside Thames. Trips to the supermarket were once routine, almost unthinking exercises. Three weeks into Level Four my return home was interrupted by a police checkpoint. The middle-aged constable leaning in through the window asking the purpose of my journey was certainly novel.

On Thursday April 2, a friend called.  ‘Commiserations’, she said. “For what?’ “The Listener, it is gone.’ I was a long-time subscriber but said I would only miss some of it. In recent months I was probably reading only one in four cover stories. There were, however, columnists I would certainly miss: Jane Clifton and anything by Paul Thomas. But it was a sudden death in the age of Covid. So was losing songwriter John Prine who had been part of my soundtrack since the 1970s. The concert in Auckland early last year now assumed enormous significance.

There was also a question of latitude. Diurnal cues – changing day-length – trigger hormonal changes that prompt a migratory bird to complete its moult, store fuel, and migrate. By the second half of April birds from New Zealand, bound for the Arctic, are refuelling along the coasts of China and Korea. Since 2015 that is where I have been at this time, counting shorebirds in North Korea. Now I am on the wrong side of the equator: thus, Anzac Day at home for the first time in five years.
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But there was uplifting news of normal systems still functioning. Several of the godwits that had been fitted with GPS tags at Pūkorokoro in November, were now refuelling on the shores of the Yellow Sea. By Level Two, they were at breeding sites in Alaska. Even better was news of some particularly special red knots. These small shorebirds specialise in eating tiny shellfish. A few dozen birds had been affected by a suspected toxic algal bloom in February.  After two weeks recovery at rehabilitation centres, they were fitted with coded leg flags and released. That this happened on the eve of their normal migration departure for eastern Russia suggested they would be behind in their preparations and would remain here for the winter. But there was to be no lockdown for them. They too were seen in China.