Writer
Language of birds: An introduction
Originally published in Working Together: Nestling Thoughts, 2023This publication departs from a film research project by Sorawit Songsataya that focuses on the relationship between the kōtuku (also known as the white heron, eastern great egret นกยางโทนใหญ่, or Ardea alba modesta) and the Waitangiroto Nature Reserve on the West Coast of Te Waipounamu. It exists within a larger body of work by the artist which explores gravity, meteorology, and flight as forces that bind the human and more-than-human within a time of ecological crisis. Developed in the two years following initial periods of filming at the nesting site at Waitangiroto, Nestling Thoughts extends an atmosphere of enquiry around this process.
The Waitangiroto reserve is located near Ōkārito, South Westland, within the takiwā of Kāti Māhaki ki Makaawhio, Poutini Ngāi Tahu. Bordered by glacier country and kahikatea forests, Ōkārito was a home to author Keri Hulme for much of her life. She wrote of the histories, feeling, and poetry of a place “black and grey … fecund. The bush thrusts forth, and the beaches are littered with driftwood.”1
The kōtuku migrate to the Waitangiroto nesting site each spring from throughout the motu. They disperse once they have raised their chicks and tend to live solitary existences until they return the following year. It is not known exactly why the birds first chose this particular spot over other coastal wetlands. What is apparent is that a fragile balance exists within the colony—which currently remains at around two hundred birds—and the surrounding ecosystem of plants, insects, fish, and other birds that have sustained it for generations.
There are few remaining areas like Waitangiroto left, the result of ecological imperialism that led to the draining and “reclaiming” of Aotearoa’s wetlands.2 Ōkārito is one of Aotearoa’s largest unmodified wetland areas within which, according to the Department of Conservation, Waitangiroto reserve “covers an area of 1534 hectares of alluvial flats, swamps and moraine ridges”.3 I can grasp at a scale and physical topology having visited the site, and by looking at a succession of maps and resource management plans, where the reserve has lines drawn around it and different land usages are delineated by keys and colour coding. It is more difficult to consider the nesting site within multiple histories and an overarching ecosystem without borders. As a coastal area it is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and extreme weather, and is bordered by dairy farms which share the same water table.
The other homes, names, and flight paths of the kōtuku thread their way throughout this book. Common throughout Asia, the South Pacific, and Australia, they are rare and endangered species in Aotearoa, which is near the limit of their geographic and climatic range from the tropical zone. In Thailand, the artist’s country of birth, they are often seen in rice fields and are part of a bigger family of egrets who are common throughout the Central Plains around Bangkok, where they stay year-round. In the rest of Thailand they are seen most often in the hotter and rainy seasons.
In Aotearoa, it is thought a small number of kōtuku arrived here from across the Tasman at least one thousand years ago. The whakataukī “he kōtuku rerenga tahi”, “a kōtuku of a single flight”, is attributed to a rare event and honoured guests that seldom visit, as the bird is not often seen here. In te ao Māori the kōtuku has a special role in bridging the threshold between worlds, accompanying the recently departed to their final resting place in Hawaiki.
In Nestling Thoughts Sorawit has shared diary-entry-like texts spanning twenty-one years between Aotearoa and Thailand, reflecting on a tenuous relationship with the kōtuku and broader thoughts on proximity and belonging. A few of these entries take the form of “observation logs” at the nesting site, recorded while filming the birds: “Second day. Feeling very uninvited by the birds still … thinking of how to communicate with the birds. What is their language?” In Sorawit’s 2021 moving image work Comfort Zone—one offshoot of the filming at Waitangiroto—footage of the nesting kōtuku is interwoven with materials that explore these questions, speaking to connections between the human, non-human, and celestial. Magnified images of feathers made up of tiny filaments are paired with shimmering digital animations of bridges floating in space, ladders that reach between faraway planets, and cartoon birds flying among pinprick stars. The film incorporates a voiceover, but subverts any expectations of a narrated David Attenborough-style “nature documentary”—instead, the voice responds to a series of prompts and personal questions that seem to test the vast potential and limits of language or connection.
Birds have a lot to carry as common symbols of Indigeneity, national identity, migration, and conservation. In Aotearoa they feature on most of our coins and banknotes, the kōtuku being the only non-endemic bird included in the lineup. Seabirds appear in mid-flight throughout the visa pages of the New Zealand passport among whales, constellations, compass coordinates, waka, and European voyaging ships. These kinds of detailed graphics are difficult to forge or copy—intended to guard the state from illegal entry or overstaying—all the while layering images of voyaging and migration as the basis for a shared identity. Pageworks by Sorawit respond to the visual language of these kinds of documents, challenging the ways in which nature and state are bound together to create identities that are fixed, gendered, individualised, and enforceable. Stills taken at the nesting site have been reworked into playful “certificates” that incorporate fragments of handwriting, printed research materials, signature fields, and images of unhatched eggs.
A “language of birds” has been leveraged to develop a kind of empathy or poetry across time and space, layering meanings—and often, kinds of longing, loss, and desire—in Aotearoa’s art and literature. I’m thinking of the dark liquid expanse of Ralph Hotere’s Godwit/Kuaka (1977). An 18-metre-long mural commissioned for the international arrivals terminal at Auckland Airport, it invokes the flight of the kuaka or bar-tailed godwit and the journey through life.4 Author Robin Hyde also employs the figure of the kuaka, alongside other birds, to navigate her experiences as an English-Australian immigrant in her enmeshing of fiction and autobiography The Godwits Fly (1938).5 Hyde once likened the kind of “effort towards understanding” she sought from her readers as “a sort of psychological reconstruction, like building up the moa from its eye-tooth”.6 I can’t help but hover on this strange image of reconstruction as it recalls Sorawit’s sculpture The Interior (2019). This work confronts the viewer with a kind of time travel through a reimagining of Trevor Lloyd’s 1907 painting Te Tangi o Te Moa (1907), where native forest birds perch nearby to observe, or perhaps to mourn, the death of the last great flightless bird and extinction of the species.7
Around this field of thinking and making, Nestling Thoughts brings together further contributions by Vera Mey, Bridget Reweti, Nik, and Louie Zalk-Neale. Each extends tangents and bigger questions posed by Sorawit’s project—from the ethics and modes of research in relation to different knowledge systems, to our relationships to plants and animals, and that which is perceived to be “other” than or “outside” of ourselves. From a variety of viewpoints, they consider how being in relation underpins potential and vitality within artistic or curatorial work, and resists the detached modes of production of extractive white heteropatriarchal capitalism.
The title Comfort Zone, which suggests a comfortable distance or vantage point—or perhaps the safety of a nest—inverts the “contact zone” invoked by Vera Mey in her contribution to this publication. Her essay, On Fieldwork, pushes notions of the insider or outsider researcher into “other amorphous positionalities” that might create “fields of knowing and fields of responsibility”. She does so through reflection on her own experiences in research and curating, acknowledgement of work by Māori scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and a consideration of the role of the “other” or foreigner within creation myths and foundational identities in Southeast Asia.
Bridget Reweti considers the role of distance and proximity in grasping what feels closest to us. She reflects on flora and fauna in Te Whenua o Moemoeā, Turtle Island and Aotearoa—including a kayaking trip around Ōkārito Lagoon. Her text revolves around observations of native and introduced species which, like the kōtuku, exist within different ecosystems, localities and cultures at once, sometimes with vastly different relationships to their environments. For Bridget, the specific names, narratives and whakapapa of these species are ways of connecting to who and where we are in a big world.
The innate queerness and vitality of living ecologies recurs throughout Nestling Thoughts. Louie Zalk-Neale has contributed a photographic series that shows an active and embodied process of self-portraiture in dialogue with natural materials. These studio drawings embody a frenetic energy of experimentation, twisting and binding together representations of queer bodies with tī kōuka fibre with whenua pigments, ink, pencil, hair, harakeke, and an atmosphere of living and making around them.
Nik reflects on the experience of living between Western Australia and Hokitika through the biological rhythm of the migratory blue moon butterfly, which is found in both countries and seen on the West Coast from March to May. There is a sense of rebirth in this gouache and pastel drawing of a hybrid winged character who is shown emerging from a spring at sunrise, surrounded by thick forest. The title of this work, Returning Through Metamorphosis, infers a shape-shifting and plurality that is found throughout nature.
As the editor of this publication, I want to end by trying to answer a question: what has the process of working together around an artist’s practice looked and felt like in this instance? It looked like long drives in the rain through drenched kahikatea forest and farmland; conversations with friends, teachers, fellow artists; rūnanga and tourism operators; sometimes-aimless visits to museum and library collections; and email, zoom, and tracked changes. We gathered a variety of materials and discussed ideas that felt tender or unresolved, and initiated conversations that sometimes didn’t go where we hoped. Most consistently it involved being confronted, the subjectivity we bring to all of our work and experiences in the world, and the feelings of being inside a process and not knowing where it is going. Overwhelmingly, I’m left with the generosity with which Sorawit has shared and expanded on this project—and of the people who have shared time, energy, and their fields of knowledge—and created space for new thoughts to emerge, to stay longer with questions, and, hopefully, for them to take flight to other destinations.
- Keri Hulme, “Ōkārito and Moeraki”, in Te Whenua, Te Iwi: The Land and The People, ed. Jock Phillips (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 1.
- See Geoff Park, Theatre Country (Wellington: Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2006), 180-194.
- Department of Conservation, Waitangiroto Nature Reserve (Hokitika: Department of Conservation, 1989), inside cover.
- For more information and a transcript of the Godwit/Kuaka chant recorded to accompany the work in 2010, see “Ralph Hotere: Godwit/Kuaka”, Chartwell Project”, accessed 10 September 2022.
- See Robin Hyde, The Godwits Fly, ed. Gloria Rawlinson (Auckland: Auckland University and Oxford University Press, 1980), 30–40.
- Patrick Sandbrook, “Not Easily Put on Paper: Robin Hyde’s The Godwits Fly”, in A Book in the Hand: Essays on the History of the Book in Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000), 129.
- This cluster of bird-witnesses have also been included in other recent installations, including an iteration of Comfort Zone in the exhibition Nature and State in Baden-Baden Germany, where birds perch on railings within a structure that recalls a DOC-built bridge, upon which a video screen playing the film is mounted.