Woolworths has Ooshies. New World has knives. Pak\u2019nSave has seagulls.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was some time in autumn, 2013, when Lucy D\u2019Aeth was doing her regular early evening cycle ride home down Manchester Street. Much of the CBD was still cordoned off as a red zone and D\u2019Aeth had been working in community mental health following the devastating earthquakes that left the city with \u201calmost nothing\u201d. But on that cycle ride home, specifically where Manchester Street meets Moorhouse Ave, she was confronted by a scene that shifted her focus well above the daily grind of post-quake Christchurch.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was that beautiful, ugly noise that made me take notice first,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThe sky had been totally silent, but then suddenly it was so full and so noisy.\u201d As thousands of red-billed gulls launched into \u201ca remarkable choreography\u201d from the roof of Pak\u2019nSave Moorhouse, she stopped in her tracks along with a dozen other bystanders. \u201cIt was mesmeric,\u201d she says. \u201cThe world\u2019s going on around you, but this thing is happening above that is completely out of sync with rush hour, post-quake Christchurch\u2026 we all just didn\u2019t know what to say to each other.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
She may have been speechless in the moment, but the scene later inspired D\u2019Aeth to pen a poem published in T\u0101kah\u0113 journal in 2016: \u201ctwice now \/ I\u2019ve witnessed the murmuration of seagulls \/ over PaknSave on Moorhouse \/ white against the evening sky \/ and the yellow of the tilt-slab temple\u201d she wrote. \u201cThe gulls wheel and scream \/ and melt into the dark.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Behold the majesty of a Moorhouse murmuration. (Photo: Facebook)<\/p>\n
Well over a decade later, the Moorhouse murmuration is still going strong. Ornithologist Peter Langlands runs bird-watching tours around Christchurch city and has been fascinated by the tar\u0101punga, or red-billed gull, since coming across a banded bird as a teenager at Cashmere High School in the 80s. Although he hasn\u2019t done any specific studies on the Pak\u2019nSave flock, he has witnessed the \u201cimpressive\u201d scene several times. \u201cThere were definitely several thousand birds there, which is a nationally significant part of the species population,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The birds likely come to Pak\u2019nSave to roost over winter months from nearby coastal breeding sites like Scarborough, or further afield in Kaik\u014dura. \u201cIt\u2019s a safe and secure open space where they can basically roost undisturbed, and obviously they\u2019ve got good vigilance to any predators \u2013 you\u2019re not going to have anything like stoats, ferrets, rats or cats on the roof of a Pak\u2019nSave,\u201d says Langlands. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely an interesting urban spectacle, but it\u2019s probably not too much of a problem either \u2013 I imagine the rain just washes off all the gull shit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The majesty of the gulls are hard to capture with modern technology. (Photos: Screenshots from Nikita Abrol\u2019s video)<\/p>\n
While Pak\u2019nSave declined to respond to The Spinoff\u2019s questions, gull shit-related or otherwise, Langlands says the Moorhouse flock is a reminder that the \u201ccharismatic\u201d species remains vulnerable in the modern world. Since 1983, the total population of tar\u0101punga has halved due to changes in the marine food supply, leading to some raising the alarm about \u201cthe end of the everywhere bird<\/a>\u201d. \u201cThey are now coming into closer contact with people, which means issues with entanglement and being hit by cars, and doesn\u2019t lead to favourable outcomes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This is also not the first time that a declining species has set up shop in a surprising spot in central Christchurch. Following the demolition of the quake-damaged PricewaterhouseCoopers building on Armagh Street, the site became an urban colony for the black-billed gull, then the most threatened gull species in the world<\/a>. The affectionately named \u201cseagull pit\u201d became a tourist attraction of sorts, gathering rave reviews on Google as a \u201cwonder of the world<\/a>\u201d for more than six years. In tribute to Joni Mitchell, the site is now a Mainland carpark.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Mitchell might also attest, we don\u2019t know what we\u2019ve got till it\u2019s gone, which is something D\u2019Aeth encourages people to consider every time they bear witness to Pak\u2019nSave Moorhouse\u2019s \u201cfree show\u201d at dusk. \u201cPeople pay a lot of money to go and see the wildebeest surge over the plains, but you can get exactly that as you\u2019re cycling home from work outside Pak\u2019nSave,\u201d she says. \u201cI just think it is a beautiful thing about the city that also captures our sense of defiance: even if you don\u2019t get us, we don\u2019t really care.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Indeed, newer arrivals are taking notice. Master\u2019s student Nikita Abrol moved to Christchurch from India just six months ago, and found the Pak\u2019nSave seagulls \u201cfascinating\u201d to behold. \u201cI have never seen that many seagulls back in my home country, and so I opened my camera and made a video straight away,\u201d she explains. In the video of the flock provided to The Spinoff, her husband can be heard speaking frantically in Hindi in the background. Translation? \u201cmove away, they\u2019re going to shit on you, they\u2019re going to shit on you.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Reflecting on first encountering the gulls in the aftermath of the quakes, D\u2019Aeth also adds that keeping your eyes open to bizarre spectacles, even somewhere as inane as a supermarket parking lot, can have a tremendously positive impact on your resilience in trying times. \u201cOne of the most beautiful pieces of research that came out of the earthquakes found that those who coped better had a greater capacity to experience awe,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s important to notice these remarkable things that put us back in our place as tiny creatures within something bigger.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn that sense,\u201d she adds, \u201cI\u2019d say the seagulls are doing us a massive favour.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Woolworths has Ooshies. New World has knives. Pak\u2019nSave has seagulls.\u00a0 It was some time in autumn, 2013, when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":587136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[19976,4487,156,111,139,69,113060,289077,2935,97,96601],"class_list":["post-587135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-birds","tag-christchurch","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-otautahi","tag-pak-n-save","tag-society","tag-supermarket","tag-the-best-of"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/587136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A banded red-billed gull from the Kaik\u014dura colony. (Photo: Peter Langlands)<\/p>\n