Kiwi Spotting
David Attenborough’s kiwi spotting experience with Phillip Smith.
He writes:“Legend has it that no one ever sees a kiwi. The only footage of this bird I knew of was filmed in zoos with nocturnal houses. Mike Salisbury, the series producer, discovered that on a fragment of land on New Zealand’s South Island there was a man who regularly saw kiwis at night on the beach, and here, they might be filmable in the wild. We met this marvellous man, Phillip Smith, and he took us in his boat to a little island he knew – a little island off a little island off a little island.”“On landing, we walked through the forest to the other side of the island, when suddenly there as a scarifying strident shriek. The man assured us that the kiwis would come out of the bush, down on the beach, to feed on sandhoppers on the rotting seaweed.
We went down to the sea, and I lay on the sand and waited. After a while, this little hunched figure came stalking along the strandline. It didn’t look like a bird at all, but more like a hobgoblin. It had no tail, a small, round, globular body, and it looked like it came from a different order of creation.A kiwi detects sandhoppers by smell – it has nostrils on the end of its beak. As I watched, the kiwi plunged its beak into the sand, but in doing so, grains went up its nose, and every now and then, it would make a raspberry sound as it noisily tried to blow the sand out. I had a torch, but it took no notice of this and came within two feet of us. It paused and blew its nose. For a moment it looked baffled and it stayed motionless, and then it seemed to decide: ‘I don’t like this’ and it ran off. It was one of those amazing encounters with a charismatic creature, and animal which is rare and strange but totally oblivious of you.”
