Listening on Hikes

posted by graham on December 03, 2024

I like to go on easy, well-manicured hikes. My general rule of thumb when people ask if I want to go on a hike with them is I'm happy to for up to about three miles and a few hundred feet of elevation gain. I wish that I had the motivation to go on more of them and get better at longer ones. Too often, I find myself focusing on my own breathing, my nose running, my muscles aching, where I'm placing my feet, or how much I wish this type-2 fun was more type-1. But when I was hiking in Aotearoa New Zealand, I found it wasn't quite as bad as other hikes I've been on, and part of that was finding a new thing to preoccupy my senses: listening to birds.

Along the Northern Edge of the South Island is the Abel Tasman National Park, named after Abel Tasman, the Dutch explorer credited with mapping out Aotearoa from his ship. There are a handful of hikes by the coast, and we selected one of the easier ones: a "seal view and beach walk" that we assumed would be a walk along a beach, perhaps in view of some seals. It turned out this was a "maybe view the seals from the boat you take to get to beach number one, so that you can hike up over hills through a forest to beach number two" situation, but thankfully we had prepared for that just in case with extra food and water.

We passed by Split Apple Rock in the ferry, and I began thinking about how many photos I had already taken of birds, only a few days into the trip. I realized that I had documented about two bird species per day^[1], so I took my phone off of airplane mode for the first time outside of a hotel and spent a not-insignificant amount of my roaming data budget for the trip downloading Cornell Lab's Merlin Bird Identification App along with the New Zealand-specific bird pack. With this on my phone, I knew that even without service, I would be able to take pictures or recordings of birds and look them up in real time.

As we landed, I immediately got to do so: there were several weka running around the beach, harassing tourists. Weka are flightless birds and more importantly, opportunistic scamps: they know that humans have food in their backpacks for hikes, and they know that humans leave backpacks on the ground to take cute photos for Instagram or whatever. While the humans are away from their backpacks, the weka will run over and either try to drag the pack away if it's little or unzip the pack and take what's inside if it's big. They're surprisingly fast runners and incredibly quiet.

Several times on our hike, a weka would pop out of a bush that we didn't realize it was in and frighten us in the process. We could be standing around eating a snack and then turn around and find a weka behind us a minute later that we didn't hear approach. I got to see two of them fighting over a piece of lettuce they found at the beach. I managed to capture a video of the chase and of one of them squawking as it ran away:

(Note: if you're reading this on an RSS feed reader, and it doesn't support video or audio html tags, you may need to go to my actual website to be able to see and hear them. To do so on inoreader, I just scroll all the way to the bottom and then keep scrolling and it loads the actual page)

Continuing up the trail, we gained elevation quickly, and I kept noticing about every 90 seconds or so that the calls of the birds would change as we rounded bends. In the past, I haven't really tried to look for birds as I'm hiking, but with this new-to-me Merlin "pokedex-but-with-real-animals" app, I found myself stopping to see where along the path I could go to get better recordings, and then using that triangulation to figure out what tree the bird was in. This meant a lot more stops as I started hearing new bird calls.

The app was fascinating: I could see a recording of multiple birds and the app would show which ones were which along with the timestamp of the recording. In the above recording of three birds, the short, high-pitched "ee"s in the background are the silvereye | tauhou, the melodical chirp that comes in secondly and sounds like it's posing a question is the eurasian blackbird, and then the third, repetative sotcatto chirping is the common chaffinch. I began to be able to place these calls among the others as the hike went on, which made identification easier.

As I started to focus more on the sounds of the birds and the rest of the forest that I was hearing, I also began to think about my interaction with those things online. I really enjoy reading blogposts about travel that friends do to foreign countries or even journeys they take around their cities. That said, it's one thing to get to read about them and see the pictures along the way, but I realized that I have very little idea for what the sounds of those places are, despite audio capturing being similarly easy as picture or video. In the forest of Abel Tasman National Park, I found myself in a soundscape, not only of generic forest with a beach on the periphery, but of specifically this place with these birds making their calls.

It's helpful that the Merlin app stores the recordings locally by default. I kept using it to try to record birds as I got closer to them. In some cases, like the tomtit^[2], I was able to find it and get a nice recording, but it flew away before I could capture a picture.

Whenever possible, I'd try to whistle the call back while I was looking for various birds. I don't know if I did a good enough job replicating any of the bird calls for them to be drawn to my whistling, but at the very least, it helped my ear to keep focused on the bird call. That being said, the call of the tūī^[3] is so elaborate that I gave up pretty immediately.

I kept hearing that call as one I didn't recognize and saying "who are you??" under my breath.^[4] I tried recording a few times, but I found that the other birds were too loud to be able to hear anything over them. Eventually, I was able to find where the tūī was singing from and got any picture at all before it flew off. This wasn't the last tūī I'd see on the trip, thankfully, but none of the others were as photogenic, nor were any of them in quiet enough settings for recording:

Once we had reached the peak of the hill that we were ascending, we stopped briefly for our packed lunch and a "random" weka sighting as we unwrapped our food. Then we started to hear new sounds echoing off the valley below us as we made our descent.

This one was beautiful and made a lot more sense once I learned the name: it was reminiscent of hearing the church bells go off across a town or a city. I never got to see it, but its sound continued to bounce around the valley every few minutes throughout the afternoon.

Continuing on, soon enough, we began to hear a new call that was easy for me to parrot^[5] with my whistling. We were down at a sort of in-between-beaches beach that was pretty close to where we were going when the sound began to be directly in front of us, and there was a new bird -- a kākā, perched on a branch high above the trail:

I was able to get a little bit closer, and snapped this next photo. But then a New Zealand pigeon | kererū^[6] arrived from behind us and the kākā was very upset and began dive-bombing it, so we made our exit to avoid getting caught up in the crossfire.

The uniqueness of there being so many birds to observe in a new place was enough of a distraction for me to lose track of the tiredness from hiking. I'm curious to go try to try some hikes now that I'm home, both in parks and beyond the city. When there's built-in stops because you're excited by something, that's a far different feeling for me from stopping because you're running up against a personal limitation. And maybe the motivation factor isn't the hike itself as much as the opportunity to go do that fun thing of cataloging birds again? Only time will tell.

This post has contained several endemic-to-New Zealand birds (weka, tauhou, tomtit, tūī, riroriro, New Zealand bellbird, kākā, kererū) already, but I also wanted to include one more that I found later on when we arrived at the beach at the end of our hike. Alternating walking around in the sand and washing themselves in the small stream of river water that was running directly down the beach and into the ocean were a pair of variable oystercatchers. One of them was sitting comfortably in the wind by tucking its bill behind a wing while the other walked about: