One of the riroriro flew close and perched on a horopito twig to examine me. It had the gangly look of a teenager not yet bulked up into adulthood, although to describe even fully-grown adults of these tiny birds as ‘bulked up’ seems ridiculous so let’s just say it looked less rounded, more slender, and slightly scruffy, the way I assume I was when I was a teenager — and still am. I wondered about its apparent curiosity. Was I the first human it had met (unlikely) or was it deciding whether I might be delicious (definitely not) or perhaps it was trying to decide whether I was a potential threat or something that might provide food (plausible — I suspect it, like most teenagers, was perpetually hungry)? Probably it was just curious and trying to figure out what I was.
When I’d last visited Leon Kinvig hut just a few weeks ago, the riroriro that had been seemingly everywhere in November, disputing territories, singing threateningly at each other, scrapping among the tangle of branches of the recently felled red beech, were much less evident. I wondered whether they’d accepted their territorial boundaries and were now preoccupied with raising young, like the family I was now watching on the No. 1 Line track. Perhaps that felled beech, which had seemed so desirable, so worth fighting over, not longer offered such an attractive addition to a territory — the leaves, still healthy in November, had by January turned brown and crisp and shrivelled and probably offered little hope of fat caterpillars or other morsels.
But who knows what a riroriro’s thinking? Who knows what prompts its behaviour? It’s often hard enough to guess accurately what another human’s thinking, even when we think we know them well, so to guess what a bird like a riroriro — so vastly different from us, particularly in its ability to fully inhabit three dimensions — might be thinking must surely be impossible. We can imagine what it’s like to be a bird (or a bat, to acknowledge Thomas Nagel’s famous paper), but imagining requires filling in the gaps in what we think we know, and when the thing we’re trying to understand is mostly gap and barely any fact, it’s hard to be confident about what we imagine. I’d like to imagine that the teenage riroriro found me both interesting and nonthreatening but I’ll never know — nor, I think, could I ever know.
Notes:
1. Riroriro are also known as grey warbler; their Latin binomial (scientific name) is Gerygone igata. You can find more photos of them in my post about my November trip.
2. Red beech: tawhai raunui; Nothofagus fusca.
Photos (click to enlarge):
1. This is the one!
2. Gratuitous photo of the Pohangina river at Leon Kinvig hut, January 2026.
Photos and original text © 2026 Pete McGregor
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