BIRD of the YEAR -- A New Zealand Threefer!
New Zealand's most important election
Voting opens in New Zealand's beloved Bird of the Year competition
New Zealand bird of the year: adult toy store endorses 'polyamorous' hihi
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New Zealand's bird of the year: the most important election – aside from the real one
What started as innocuous good fun has evolved into a national obsession, complete with voter fraud, skulduggery and high passions
Of course, by then – the 13th year of the competition – organisers knew to expect dodgy dealings in New Zealand’s bird of the year poll.
If a nationwide vote to name a favourite native bird sounds like innocuous good fun – a creative means of celebrating unique, threatened fauna – you may be underestimating bird of the year. Coordinated by the Royal Forest & Bird Society, an environmental nongovernmental organisation, it is often described as the country’s most important election – second only to, you know, the actual elections. Since 2017 , too, it has had the same validation as two other Kiwi creations, pavlova and Russell Crowe: Australia has tried to pass it off as its own .
From a total of 900 votes received (some by post) in the first vote in 2005, bird of the year has grown to about 28,000 in 2015 and more than 48,000 in 2018 – nearly double the number that just elected the mayor of Wellington.
The kererū was crowned
2018’s bird of the year.
Alamy
As in politics, electioneering has become more advanced. Each bird has a campaign manager or team, who stop at nothing to give their species the edge. In the past there have been Tinder profiles (for the black stilt), tattoos (of the saddleback) and celebrity endorsements (by Stephen Fry and Bill Bailey, for the kākāpō and the takahē).
It is a testament to the close competition that, in 14 years, no species has won twice. Last year’s victor , with 12% of the vote, the kererū – the native wood pigeon known for gorging itself on fermented fruits and making drunken crash landings into trees – took flight early on in the competition with memes celebrating the “magnificent thicc boi”.
Team Kereru promised to “govern for the many”, while Jacinda Ardern – who had backed the black petrel or tāiko, “the bogan of birds” – accepted the outcome of the democratic process with dignity. A seabird is yet to win bird of the year.
Another underdog is the banded dotterel or pohowera, a skittish little plover, for which George Hobson of Wellington has served as campaign manager since 2015, when he was 11 years old. His campaign was “pretty average” back then, he admits, winning just under 150 votes; this year he has been directly contacting businesses, NGOs, “basically as many people as I can” to ask for their support. His highest profile supporter so far is the former PM and UN development programme head Helen Clark.
Hobson, now 16, says a vote for the nationally vulnerable “underbird” is a vote for diversity: “Out of the 14 bird of the year winners we’ve had, eight of them have had names beginning with the letter ‘k’ – so we really need to change it up a little bit. And we’re playing a reasonably fair and straightforward campaign – compared to some others.”
Not every bird plays by the rules – the black-billed gull ran a notoriously foul-mouthed campaign in 2017, calling the kiwi “a fat flightless fuck” – and the competition is reliably derailed by voter fraud. In 2018 the shag was among 16 species to be boosted by fraudulent votes. In 2017 someone in Christchurch used a random email address generator to lodge 112 votes for the white-faced heron. (The black-billed gull called it racist.)
And in 2015 hundreds of illegal votes for the North Island kokako sent it briefly to first place, before the bird’s campaign manager nobly reported foul play. The culprits, two sisters in Auckland, were later identified by their apologetic father.
“I actually think we were mostly impressed that two teenagers went to the effort of hacking the system for their favourite bird,” says Kimberley Collins, then competition coordinator. “We were like, ‘Hey, maybe don’t do it again – but good on you for caring so much.’”
Collins, a freelance science communicator, managed bird of the year for four years and remembers it fondly as a “stressful time”.
This is her first year not formally involved, though she is backing the hoiho, the yellow-eyed penguin. “And one of our campaign values is we don’t heckle other birds, because we think other birds are awesome.”
The passion – and occasional skulduggery – is a testament to that personal connection that most New Zealanders feel to their native birds, Collins says: “There’s a bit of friendly heckling but also a lot of support, because we’re all people who care desperately about our native birds, and We don’t want to see any extinctions in our lifetimes.”
‘Catering for the bird nerds’
In the absence of any large native mammals – there are two species of bat that, by and large, fail to capture public imagination – New Zealand’s idiosyncratic birdlife serve as its best known and loved symbols of its unique biodiversity. Some New Zealanders would even have their namesake bird on the national flag, as was memorably established in the 2015 referendum .
The challenge for bird of the year, Collins says, has been striking the balance between keeping it fresh and fun for the public – “but also catering for the bird nerds who get, um, quite caught up in it”.
A teenager once sent her a spreadsheet of every bird species and subspecies from New Zealand , the Chatham Islands and the sub-Antarctic islands. There were more than 200 – not practicable for an online poll.
Another voter emailed Collins “multiple times, absolutely furious” at the inclusion of the pukeko because the swamphen species is also found in Australia.
The nation’s enthusiasm for its endemic wildlife is not always matched by efforts to understand or protect it. A 2016 Lincoln University study found that the perception of native species’ condition is largely adequate to good. Yet a report by the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services this year found that more than 4,000 animals and birds were at risk of extinction.
The serious side to bird of the year is engaging the public in the breadth of New Zealand’s birdlife, beyond species that appear on the banknotes – as well as the challenges they face.
For Hobson, staring down his fifth campaign year, he admits: “I’d quite like to see a banded dotterel win” – and with the former PM’s backing, the chances of the “small little brown birds that run around our beaches” have never been better. “If we can connect people with our beautiful birds, then that’s almost a gateway for them to start caring more about conservation,” he says.
Collins agrees that a passion for birds can lead on to an interest in the rest of New Zealand’s flora and fauna. The New Zealand Plant Conservation Network already runs plant of the year, she notes.
“I’ve always personally been a big advocate for bat of the year, because it would be so easy to run,” she says. “Two bats. One tick.”
Voting opens in New Zealand's beloved Bird of the Year competition
What started 15 years ago as a modest promotion to draw attention to native birds, many of which are endangered, has become a phenomenon
Voting began on Monday in the hotly contested and brutal election of New Zealand’s Bird Of The Year.
What started 15 years ago as a modest promotion to draw attention to New Zealand’s native birds, many of which are endangered, has become a phenomenon. Back then an entry page in the NZ Forest & Bird magazine had to be ripped out, filled in and posted. Last year more than 40,000 votes were cast online.
As ever, heavyweight names are chiming in. Word is the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is backing the black petrel again this year. “She calls it the Bogan Bird because it dresses in black” says Laura Keown, spokesperson for Bird of the Year 2020.
“It’s a cool bird because it faces a lot of threats. Due to its feeding habits it gets caught as bycatch by commercial and recreational fishers.”
There’s been scandal and allegations of vote rigging . In 2008, the successful campaign to elect kakapo was accused by the takahe of accepting undeclared donations “from wealthy migratory birds living in Monaco.”
Even the odd non-Kiwi gets hooked. “I’m so glad I’ve followed enough New Zealanders to start seeing #BirdOfTheYear posts in my timeline,” Mark Bessey, a software writer residing in Santa Barbara wrote on Twitter. “They’re bringing some much needed joy (and very weird-looking birds) to my Twitter experience.”
Defending champ, the Hoiho , live and breed only in New Zealand. Their numbers have been heading downhill for 30 years and in 2019, only 165 nests were located.
In the Māori language, hoiho means ‘noisy’, also an apt description of the social media debate about which bird should triumph.
When Helen Clark, the country’s former prime minister, declared a few elections ago that she’d voted for the Hoiho, not everyone was thrilled.
“Helen, you wot mate? Not gannets?,” responded and incredulous Michelle Langstone, campaign manager for the gannet and inventor of the hashtag #dammitgannet . “Gannets are magnificent! This is very disappointing.”
Langstone, writer, actor, chip fanatic,
won’t be driving the gannet campaign this time but Langstone is squarely in their corner. Put it down to the bruising nature of politics. “I am emotionally drained, and all elections give me hives,” she declared recently on Twitter.
Pressed further, Langstone elaborated to The Guardian, “And I’ve realised nobody will ever vote for gannets, so I just love them on my own.”
She is urging punters to cast all five of their votes for seabirds which she says are “largely overlooked in popularity contests, because they’re mostly offshore, and they smell, and they haven’t got fancy plumage, and many of them are not endangered. But they’re so heroic.”
Keown puts the competition’s popularity down to the Kiwi sense of humour. “They enjoy the frivolity, the fun.”
But there is a serious side to proceedings. About 75% of land birds and 90% of seabirds are judged to be threatened or at risk of extinction. Their habitats are being destroyed or degraded by introduced predators, pollution, human development, and climate change.
Recent Birds Of The Year include the plump wood pigeon, the Kererū, with its green, copper and white dreamcoat, that alpine thief, the Kea (it’ll steal your lunch and your bootlaces) and the Forrest Gump of the skies, the bar-tailed godwit which have just returned to New Zealand from Siberia, a non-stop flight of some 12,000 kilometres.
No past winner has won again. There’s no rule against it, says Keown. “I think it’s just the heart of New Zealanders that they want to share the love.”
Voting closes on 15 November.
Adult toy store endorses 'polyamorous' hihi (New Zealand bird of the year)
Small bird with unusually large testes receives a boost as competition is also rocked by vote-rigging row
Hihi or stitchbird, has been endorsed by a
sex chain for New Zealand’s Bird of the Year contest.
Rod Williams/Alamy Stock Photo
The annual competition, which began 15 years ago to draw attention to native birds, many of which are endangered, has grown into a national obsession. Different types of birds have their own campaign managers and the competition is so fierce that this year has seen record early voting – with 40,000 ballots cast so far and five days still remaining
The poll’s success has attracted commercial interests, such as the endorsement this week by Adult Toy Megastore of the hihi, a “polyamorous, sexually fluid bird with big The hihi, or stitchbird, is the only bird in the world to mate face to face, according to a statement released by Adult Toy Megastore as part of its campaign endorsement.
“We are proud to endorse the hihi for bird of the year 2020. Hihi lead the sex positivity movement among songbirds and for that we salute them and say to you: VOTE HIHI.
“Male and female hihi practice consensual polyamory [the practice of intimate relationships with more than one partner, with the informed consent of all partners] which is rare.
“Male hihi have testicles four times larger than they should be making them, by size, the largest testicles on a bird in the world!… How could you not vote for them?”
Claims of consensual polyamory, however, were contradicted by a 2004 university thesis which found “male stitchbirds seem to be able to bypass female choice through adopting a face to face forced copulation position”.Massey University zoologist, Isabel Castro, who studied hihi mating systems, found they had a reproductive flexibility with few peers among perching birds. They can be found in conventional pairings or in breeding groups, Castro told NZ Geographic magazine. The group might consist of one male and several females, or in some cases one female may have several males in attendance.
Hihi are the third member, after the tui and bellbird, of the local branch of the honeyeater family. It has come perilously close to extinction in the past and is currently classified by bird of the year organisers as “in some trouble”.
The bird of the year competition is no stranger to skullduggery, with organisers announcing on Tuesday they had discovered more than 1,500 fraudulent votes for the Kiwi pukupuku, or little-spotted kiwi, cast in the dead of Monday night.“It’s lucky we spotted this little kiwi trying to sneak in an extra 1,500 votes under the cover of darkness!” said Laura Keown, spokesperson for bird of the year.
“All of our birds deserve a fighting chance, especially this little manu, our smallest kiwi, which is so threatened by predators that it is extinct on mainland New Zealand outside of predator-free sanctuaries.”
The kiwi pukupuku campaign manager, Emma Rawson, said voter fraud was not the Kiwi way. “As Aotearoa’s national emblem, the little-spotted kiwi represents New Zealanders’ values of democracy, fairness, equality, and honesty.”
The competition has made household names of many of the country’s feathered characters: the kea, or alpine thief, the kereru, or large drunkard, and now it seems it could be the “horny” hihi, one of New Zealand’s rarest birds.Prominent voters in the competition include former premier, Helen Clark (a fan of the hoiho/ yellow-eyed penguin), and current prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, who is said to again be backing the black petrel or “the bogan bird” as she refers to it because it dresses in black.
Early voting has the toroa (Antipodean albatross) and the kakapo, a heavy flightless parrot, leading the field with the final result unlikely to be known until the competition’s complex preferential voting system is worked through.
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I'm surely too old to move to New Zealand... but Damn!
It sure has a lot going for it.
For many years I felt that if I was ever going to move to another country, I wanted to move to New Zealand. As it happens, I'm quite happy to have moved to where I am now.
Having spent a lot of time in NZ I found it to be a most fun-loving country and I fell in love with the Maori people there. I have long-time friends in Wanaka and Queenstown that I communicated with on a regular basis so I'm aware of the Bird of the Year voting.
The Land of the Long White Cloud a wonderful place indeed.