No shore thing: Steve Braunias on the perfectly deformed wrybill snubbed again for Bird of the Year

Everything was going so well at the Ashley River until I turned up. I happened to be in Christchurch for business and had arranged to fit in a few hours of birdwatching at one of the smaller of the fabulous braided rivers trickling through beds of gravel towards the Canterbury
coast. An invitation had come from the Ashley-Rakahuri Rivercare Group (ARRG), an award-winning team of conservation volunteers who manage an 18km section of the river. They wanted support for their nomination in this year’s Bird of the Year contest: the small but perfectly deformed wrybill, the ngutu pare.

The weather that week had been gorgeous, hard-blue skies capturing the outline of the Southern Alps and shining brightly on the wide braided rivers of blue water and round rock. But I brought Auckland weather with me – dark, cold, unforgiveable, within 30 minutes of arriving at Christ­church Airport. It was a morning flight. I had been up at dawn drying out my gumboots with my daughter’s hairdryer. By the time I got to the Ashley riverbed north of Christchurch, the temperature had dropped and a mean wind moved in wanting a fight. I got to the river from the north bank, opposite the Rangiora Airfield on the south bank, and met ARRG operations manager Grant Davey. His greeting was cold. He was in shock. His face was set in an expression that matched the acronym ARRG.

Only 10 minutes earlier he had watched two deaths. Davey has trail cameras set up along the river to keep watch on nesting wrybills. There are an estimated 5000 wrybills in New Zealand, which is to say there are an estimated 5000 wrybills in the world. They are shoreline waders, small and fast on their feet, a successful freak of nature as the only bird in the world with a sideways beak. It twists to the right and gives the bird a satirical expression, as though it wears a permanent smirk on its face. New Zealand: home of birds that cannot fly, and birds bigger than beasts (moa, Haast’s eagle); the wrybill, with its evolutionary deformity, is yet another eccentric going about its business only in Aotearoa.

Unexpected threat: A little owl snatches a fledgling wrybill and egg from the nest. Photos / Grant Davey

Infrared film on Davey’s cameras had shown a little owl, sometimes known as the German owl, swooping down on a wrybill nest. One was still in its egg. The other had hatched. The owl killed and ate both. “I’ve only just seen it,” says Davey. “I’ve had a camera there since August and have thousands of photos and everything was going wonderfully. Up until now the worst thing I’ve seen is a black-fronted tern on an egg for a month, watching it hatch, and being fed, and then rats coming in at night and taking the first chick and then an entire colony. But now this. It’s like a kick in the guts. It’s just not nice.”

The most common predators of wrybills are rats and cats. “We have never seen an owl involved before,” Davey said. “We set traps for feral cats and Norway rats. Harriers are also a problem. Now we have another problem we didn’t know about.”

Worst of all, the parent of the eaten eggs is the superstar of the wrybill world, known to science as BW-BW and to the ARRG gang as “our hero bird”. He is thought to be at least 17 years old – not the oldest wrybill (the record seems to be 25) but fair to describe as one tough sonofabitch. The look of thunder of Davey’s face lightened.

“He just keeps on keeping on,” he said. “He really is a bloody special bird. Firstly, because he’s been here so long, year after year. And the last two years he seems to have been the first wrybill to nest. Also, when his mate is on the nest, he is keeping an eye on her all the time and if she gets off, because she has trouble with other birds or something getting to the nest, he quickly comes to help. I don’t see that with any of the other birds.”

We went out on to the river and looked for him. ARRG volunteers Sue Mardon, Judith Hughey and Shelley Topp scanned the river with their binoculars. There was no sign. I called Davey a fortnight later. There was still no sign. He said, “It could well be that he got such a big fright he’s gone somewhere else. It could be that he’s deceased. It’s just so hard to know. But I’m planning on going back out this afternoon and having a look around.”

I asked him to phone when he got back.

Bird of the year bust

Keith Woodley, now in his 33rd year as manager of the Pūkorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre, wrote a story for the Listener in August about the wrybill. He was leading the campaign for it to win Bird of the Year. He has good form. Woodley campaigned for the bar-tailed godwit in 2015, to mark the centre’s 40th anniversary. It won. He chose the wrybill to mark the 50th anniversary. It finished in 17th place, a humiliating result. I called him at Miranda to taunt him. “I’ll get over it,” Woodley said, between clenched teeth.

Bird of the Year 2025: Kārearea/New Zealand Falcon. Photo / Getty Images

I felt his pain. I loathe the Bird of the Year contest, staged by Forest & Bird. Since its inception in 2005, voting has shown a clear bias towards forest birds, and has only once crowned a shorebird even though the estuaries and river’s edges of New Zealand attract a fabulous range of waders: stilts, dotterels, oystercatchers, herons, spur-winged ­plovers (I wish they were still known aby their previous name, masked lapwings). And wrybills, those practised inter-islanders, only 20cm tall but hard as nails – wrybill have flown off course and hung on as far as the Chatham Islands. There was an especially poignant headline in ornithology journal Notornis, from 1968, about an observation of another lost straggler: “Wrybill in Greymouth”.

It should win the damned contest year after year. Apart from its exclusiveness to New Zealand, apart from its commitment to fidelity within marriage and its excellent parenting and its strength in the air, on the ground and on the water, and even apart from its twisted mouth, the wrybill is a classic New Zealander at home in both the North and South Islands. It breeds in the tough debris of rock and shingle of southern braided rivers; it feeds on the soft tidal mudflats of northern harbours.

“They unite these completely different habitats every year,” Woodley says. “So, you know, in terms of a national unifying connector, what better than a wrybill?”

He is not letting it go. Birdwatchers are a determined species. He was right to lament the wrybill’s poor placing. The wrybill was among 73 birds nominated for the 2025 Bird of the Year contest. It was won by the kārearea, our native falcon. Why? No one has ever got very excited about it, unlike the wrybill.

Anarhynchus frontalis in Latin, the wrybill has astonished the outside world ever since it was first recorded by two French naturalists in 1827. With the usual sense of colonial possessiveness, the great ornithologist WRB Oliver was wildly incorrect in his 1930 masterpiece, New Zealand Birds, when he claims the French “discovered the remarkable species”. Māori in Tāmaki Makaurau and Kaipara, as well as southern Ngāi Tahu, would have been familiar with it for quite some time.

Migratory wrybills are imperilled by rats, cats, motorbikes and even owls. Photo / Grant Davey

Buller’s Birds (1872) by Walter Buller, puts it a little better, describing the 1827 event as wrybills becoming “first known to science”. The oddity of its asymmetrical bill was so startling that English ornithologist George Gray claimed in 1862 that it was “perfectly straight in most specimens”. Later work by such as Thomas Potts of Christchurch (his citation in Te Ara: “an alert, vivacious, peppery, little man”) put the record straight and confirmed the bill was bent in all specimens. The angle is 12 degrees and upwards.

It has other special characteristics. “They run with marvellous celerity,” wrote Buller, “their little black legs, when viewed sideways, appearing to revolve like the spokes of a wheel.” A good deal of Buller’s knowledge was at the end of a gun. “Ten or so may be killed at a single shot.” He was referring to their complicated aeronautical displays, when hundreds gather to form mass swoops and dives, as exciting but not as strangely melancholic as flocks of starlings in flight.

Edgar Stead, in Life Histories of New Zealand Birds (1932), grimaced at their mating rituals. The male was “pompous” and self-satisfied. Potts marvelled at their swimming: “I have known them to cross a stream of considerable volume.”

Bob Stidolph, in The Birds Around Us (1971), had an interesting description of wrybill eggs as “a dead colour”. That’s a bit rough: the ARRG team led me to a wrybill nest on the Ashley, where a small scrape contained a clutch of two eggs, a subtle blue-grey, beautifully disguised among the shingle.

Voting has shown a clear bias towards forest birds, and has only once crowned a shorebird.

Steve Braunias

As Stead wrote in 1932, “There are two desiderata of the wrybill for its nesting site: considerable areas of bare shingle, near water.” ARRG is active in clearing weed from the Ashley. Wrybills will not nest anywhere near the wretched introductions of lupins, broom and crack willow, which provide cover for predators.

Woodley is familiar with the wrybill migratory pattern of leaving outside his front door in Miranda every August to fly to their many nesting spots on the braided rivers of Canterbury, including Ashley. They return to the Firth of Thames and the mudflats of the Manukau Harbour towards Christmas. “We’re seeing a slight increase in the population, which is good news,” he said. “It’s speculative but I would like to think that’s because there’s been a lot of good work going on in some of the Canterbury braided rivers, you know, taking out weeds and a lot of predator control.”

Still looking

At the Ashley River, Davey has counted more wrybills, too. In the first years of ARRG monitoring, there were an average of 11 wrybills. That number has since doubled. Minus, however, BW-BW.

After he again went out looking for the absent hero, Davey called back as asked. “I was a few hundred metres downstream and a few hundred metres upstream from his nest, and I also looked on the south side of the river for a few hundred metres where he had been feeding lately,” he said.

And?

“He’s not there. We shouldn’t really be that worried. I expect he will turn up.”

He sighed, and said, “Here’s a quote for you. I reckon he has got indomitable spirit. To be able to survive with everything that’s thrown at wrybills, all the natural things plus the predators and the motorbikes – he’s actually a step above the rest. He’s first there to nest. He looks after his mate. And for him to keep coming back for that long is just exceptional. Totally exceptional.”

Wrybill’s return to Canterbury’s many braided rivers every year to nest. Photo / Getty Images

I asked him about the fatal incident of the owl in the night time, BW-BW’s last stand. He gave an exact timeline.

“Okay. 7:09pm, that’s when it took the chick. It was still there at 7:21. And then BW-BW came back at 7:22, sneaking along the ground. He went away again at 7:30 and at 7:34 the owl was back again. BW-BW comes back at 9:14 and the owl returned at 12:31am.

“So yeah, the owl came back, what, two or three times, and BW-BW came back during that time, very bravely. When black-fronted terns are disturbed like this, they come back – if they come back at all – in the morning, often six or seven hours later. Not BW-BW. He’s right in there.

“BW-BW’s mate came back at 6:18am. She turned up unusually early, about two hours before she normally would. She hung around for half the day and for quite a lot of that time she was calling.”

I said, “You mean she was calling from the empty nest?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know why else she would be calling apart from calling for him.”

There was no sign of Mrs BW-BW, either.

Davey said he would go out again the next morning. He emailed at 9:24am, “It seems we may have a significant owl problem we didn’t know about before. There was another bloody owl at a wrybill nest – about 7km down the river. No chicks and it didn’t touch the eggs. The wrybill came back.”

I replied, “Which wrybill came back – BW-BW, do you mean?”

He answered, “This was another wrybill further down the river.”

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