The mystery of black-and-white

Earlier this year, for reasons I don’t remember, I began thinking about how photographs of birds are now almost always in colour. The alternative to colour, of course, is monochrome, often referred to as black-and-white and I’d been wondering whether black-and-white photographs of birds could still have any impact. Perhaps I’d been irritated by the way a carefully prepared colour photograph can end up looking dreadful, the colours garish and bearing little resemblance to the original photograph even when that’s been processed on a computer with a hardware-calibrated monitor. Facebook is particularly bad for distorting (i.e. ruining) colours, although posting photos in .png format instead of .jpg format seems to avoid the problem (but is there anything that works properly on facebook, the platform so enshittified that it’s now like a parody of itself?). Besides, even the most meticulously prepared colour photograph can’t influence the monitor on which it’s displayed and only a tiny percentage of monitors are regularly calibrated, so what you see on another monitor is mostly a matter of luck. 

Last century, controlling colour was much less of a problem because for many decades the only practical option for most photographers was the black-and-white print, and even bird photography was mostly a black-and-white medium. That came with its own problems: notably, how to give the impression of different colours in a monochrome image. But compared to the problems of working with actual colours, that problem was easy to deal with, admittedly because the options for dealing with it were so limited, typically involving the use of different coloured filters.[1]

Now, however, viewers expect a photograph of a bird to be in colour. Is it still possible to produce a black-and-white photograph of a bird that has real impact, I wondered? How might that be possible? Why would you even bother?

 …

Not long afterwards, my tramping mate Robb got in touch. He’d persuaded Tara to let him put a series of black-and-white prints of the Ruahine on the wall and wanted to know if I had anything suitable. He liked the mystery of black-and-white, he said. Coincidence or synchronicity? Whichever it was, his query goaded me into action. He’d suggested one photograph he thought would work, so I retrieved it from an old hard drive and worked it up into black-and-white. Not bad, I thought, so I tried a few others. Not all worked well and some weren’t what Robb had in mind. But, among those I processed as black-and-white photographs were several of whio, and I was surprised and pleased that they did seem better than I’d expected. Perhaps the reason was partly because, despite the English common name ‘blue duck’, whio are not blue — at least, not a distinct blue — and getting their colours ‘right’ can be extraordinarily difficult. Removing colour from the list of things to deal with made the processing more straightforward and I was able to concentrate on other aspects, like contrast and tonal range, composition, and subtle selective sharpening or blurring.

 However, while they were better than I’d expected they still seemed to me like straightforward records of the birds, and I was hoping I’d be able to find some way of saying something other than ‘here’s a whio’. What seemed missing was an element of that aspect Robb had suggested — a sense of mystery, that something else was present or was going on, that the story suggested was more than just ‘here’s a bird’. How might that be achieved, especially when I don’t even know what it is?

 …

 Around the time I was thinking about these things I was also reading a book about killing elephants. The author, Walter D. M. Bell, called ‘Karamojo Bell’ because of his extensive hunting in the Karamoja region of Uganda in the early twentieth century, is widely regarded as among the greatest of Africa’s white colonial hunters. The book, Karamojo Safari, is hard to read, mainly because of his attitudes not just towards elephants but towards the local people (whom he referred to as ‘the natives’: ‘mostly savage and primitive peoples’[2]). Even allowing for the context (the book, published in 1949, recounted Bell’s elephant hunting safaris at and following the end of the nineteenth century), Bell’s writing is, let’s say, uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I enjoyed much else about the book. Yet, constantly, I found myself mourning a time long gone. He’d write about how he looked out from a kopje or a mountainside at vast numbers of animals on seemingly endless savannahs, and even Bell himself realised, when he wrote the book almost half a century later, that those days had vanished.[3] He was undoubtedly stricken by nostalgia; I, however, having never experienced that time nor place, experienced a keen sense of anemoia. If you don’t already know, anemoia is ‘nostalgia for a time you never experienced’[4] and a key way it can be triggered is by looking at a black-and-white photograph.

 That resonated, and I realised a black-and-white photograph didn’t always need a sense of mystery to trigger strong emotions. During one of my last visits to my sister, she and my younger brother and I sorted through a great many old prints from the unofficial family archive. More than a few were of us when we were small children and although they held little mystery — we knew who the subjects were (us!) and often remembered the circumstances when our dad had photographed us (it helped that he was a professional photographer as well as an excellent one) — their rendering as mostly black-and-white prints conferred a sense of returning to that long gone past: not quite nostalgia because the emotions they evoked were merely tinged with yearning rather than saturated with it. I doubt colour prints would have affected me as strongly, and now I think that might have been because dad’s primary photographic medium was the black-and-white print.

 …

 As is the way in this era of surveillance capitalism, I soon found my Instagram feed being populated by an increasing number of posts about photographers and photography with a strong predilection for black-and-white as a medium. For once, I didn’t mind. I discovered a lot that impressed me (among much that didn’t), and it didn’t take long before I realised what should have been obvious: that the appeal of black-and-white can take many forms and isn’t just limited to nostalgia, anemoia, or even a sense of mystery. Sometimes, for example, what’s appealing can be patterns, textures, forms, or the tones themselves (I’m struggling to find a way to avoid referring to ‘shades of grey’).

 I’d already known about the marvellous work of Ragnar Axelsson and the book Ravens by Masahisa Fukase, but the work of Pentti Sammallahti was new to me, as was that of Gilles Nicolet and Chieko Shiraishi. Other black-and-white photography, particularly much of what Instagram presented from contemporary photographers, I found overprocessed and melodramatic, as if the photographer (perhaps more accurately, the photo editor) had been desperately afraid that the viewer might fail to feel the drama of the moment. The most powerful photographs, I realised, were often characterised by subtlety: a character harder to achieve than it might appear. The line between a mediocre photograph and a powerful one was itself subtle, not easily pinned down.

 …

I converted a couple of new photographs to black-and-white and showed them to a friend. She liked them but she’d already seen the original colour versions and wanted to know what extra the black-and-white conversions offered. I shouldn’t have been surprised (and wasn’t — offering both colour and black-and-white versions and asking ‘which do you prefer?’ is a well-used way to get social media engagement) but the comment, although well-intentioned, gnawed at me. All that effort to arrive at the black-and-white image was pointless, it suggested.

 But it’s not. The point of the conversion is not to compare colour with black-and-white; the conversion is an end in its own right and the crucial question is not ‘which do you prefer?’ but  ‘how well does this work as a black-and-white photograph?’ or ‘what impact does it have?’ or ‘what does it evoke?’ The comparison could also be flipped so that instead of asking what extra a black-and-white version offers over a colour version, one might ask what colour would add that would improve the photograph.

 More specifically, how would the addition of colour influence the viewer’s perception of the important elements in the photograph? Colour, I’ll suggest, does not always improve a photograph: it can distract and detract, drawing attention away from particular elements and changing the way the image acts on the viewer. To complicate matters even more, colour preferences change with age and gender-related social conditioning, so what you experience when you view a colour photograph will depend at least in part on your age and gender.

 …

 I was sitting outside at the back door before dawn on the coldest day of the year so far, drinking tea, watching flocks of pigeons flying out from the city, and thinking about these and related questions. A thought came to me: perhaps, when we look at a black-and-white photograph in the twenty-first century, in this age when colour is an hegemony, we subconsciously wonder why the photograph is not in colour and we assume its main intention is something other than simply documenting a moment. In other words, when you remove colour from a photograph, you remove much of the temptation to view the image as a mere representation of its subject. Instantly, you begin to wonder, and perhaps it’s in that wondering that the sense of mystery resides.

—//—

---

Notes: 
1. Even when colour photography did become common the choice was between colour prints or colour transparencies (‘slides’). Few photographers processed those themselves, so what you got depended on the competence of the lab that did the processing and once you’d pressed the shutter release the process was out of your hands. Now, serious photographers do their own processing: on a computer. Photographing a bird or other subject in colour no longer ends when you hand a roll of film to a lab, and because manipulating colour is now up to the photographer, the process is more complex and the results more variable than working in black-and-white.
2. P. 3 in Bell, W. M. D. (1949). Karamojo safari. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
3. ‘This is a true story of a journey into Karamojo some fifty years ago when it was an unknown [sic] part of Africa. Indeed, even today with the aid of modern transportation, it is but little known. [...]  At the time dealt with in this book, the author was the first white man seen by the natives. Needless to say, the conditions prevailing can never occur again.’ (Bell, 1949, p. 15).
4. From The dictionary of obscure sorrows, by John Koenig.

Photos (All are from the Ruahine Forest Park. Be sure to click them to see a better image): 
1.Whio pair, Maropea river, December 2023
2. Robb Kloss on the final descent to Sunrise hut from Armstrong Saddle, July 2022
3. Whio pair preening before dawn, Maropea Forks, December 2023
4. Miromiro (North Island tomtit) on the track from Upper Makaroro to Parks Peak hut, February 2024
5. Robb Kloss climbs the track from Maropea Forks to Puketaramea, July 2022

Photos and original text © 2026 Pete McGregor

Enrico's coincidences

Over a decade ago I sat on the verandah of the top storey of the Tiger Eye Guest House in Manali, listening to an Italian man explain the way the world really works. At the time, I couldn’t work out whether Enrico was a genius or seriously unhinged from reality but he was impossible not to like and I count the time I spent with him, relaxing on the verandah with a beer and a plate of veg momos, among the highlights of my time in India. One thing he said in particular has stayed with me.

“There are no coincidences,’ he insisted. “They’re against the laws of physics.”

Whether he was right or not, I’ve often wondered about that claim. Most recently, on an overnight walk to Iron Gate hut in the headwaters of the Oroua River in the Ruahine, two things happened that might be considered coincidental. The first occurred as I was about to leave the car and start walking. I’d been relishing the fact that mine was the only vehicle at the carpark, meaning I’d have the whole valley — and, most importantly, the hut — to myself, when a ute roared up and stopped nearby. A short, lively man jumped out of the driver’s seat and started talking. He and his wife and son had driven from near Wellington. Barry used to work for the New Zealand Forest Service decades ago and the conversation soon got around to photography. He’d known John Johns, the legendary NZFS wildlife photographer who, Barry claimed, worked exclusively in black-and-white. Perhaps that’s not surprising in that era but — here’s the coincidence — I was struck by the fact Barry mentioned it without knowing I’d recently been thinking hard about B&W photography.

The second coincidence happened as I walked out from Iron Gate hut the following day. Some time after leaving, I was thinking how I hadn’t seen or even heard a whio and how this would be the first time in many trips that I’d missed out on the delight of meeting these beautiful birds. I tried to be philosophical rather than disappointed but I’d become so used to great encounters with whio on my trips over the last several years that not seeing one left me eager to do another trip where I’d have a better chance of seeing them. The thought lingered but eventually other things distracted me. Just before the descent to Tunupo Creek I took a short diversion to look out over the deep valley from the top of a big, savagely eroded slip. I stood a metre back from the undercut lip, enjoying the sense of height, the sound of the river far below, the steep beech-forested mountainsides. A tiny bright spot at the edge of the water caught my eye and despite the distance I knew this wasn’t just another boulder. I saw it move slightly. A shag, perhaps? It moved again, and this time I was sure — I was looking at the bright bill of a whio. I started to unpack the camera and big lens for a closer inspection, and as I opened the pack I heard the whistle. The bird in the river was a male whio. I photographed it for the record and was about to pack the camera away when I saw something else moving. Checking through the lens, I saw another whio trundling across the boulders towards the male. The two birds swam a little way downstream and as I photographed and recorded a short video I thought how I’d had my meeting after all, from an unlikely place, almost at the last possible moment of the trip, and not long after I’d been thinking all opportunities had gone.

Coincidence? Probably, but Enrico would have disagreed, and I suspect he'd have been right. 

River-bed boulder

turning into a whio
as the dawn light grows

---

Notes:
1. I'm working on a related post about black-and-white photography. Now, though, I'm about to leave for another three days in the Ruahine.
2. Those last three lines might look like a haiku but using that term is fraught as well as potentially a form of appropriation. I prefer to think of 'haiku' written in English as 'inspired by' haiku — as 'haiku-like things' (HLT) 🙂Besides, the obsession with form (the irritating 5-7-5 syllable count in particular) is not just based on a misconception of the Japanese form but, as the late Cyril Childs pointed out, is like 'focusing on the cage that surrounds the singing bird.' Yes, I often use the 5-7-5 pattern but only as an interesting and useful constraint. 

Photos (please click the images to view a better version):
1. Astelia, stump, and rain at Maropea Forks hut in the Ruahine, July 2024
2. Young Red Beech forest at Triangle hut, Ruahine, February 2026
3. Male Whio whistling in the Pohangina River, Ruahine, November 2021

Photos and original text © 2026 Pete McGregor

A short walk in the ngahere

At the picnic table near the junction of the Tawa and Te Apiti tracks it was partly cloudy and almost calm. Cicadas were stridulating all along the Tawa track, which I’d chosen so I could walk the loop anticlockwise for a change and, besides, an annoying pain deep inside my left knee had persuaded me to choose the easier direction, ‘easier’ meaning very slightly longer but significantly less steep. The irritating pain eventually subsided, as I’d expected.

My first sight of the car park as I drove up depressed me: too many vehicles. I imagined the track swarming with people, with families, with yelling kids excited at being able to bash things with sticks and complain about whether they were there yet and wanting to know how much further and going quiet and sullen when they saw me approaching. I expected to have no more than a few minutes of solitude before meeting yet another person, or a sweating couple, or some old people inching along with walking poles and cheerfulness and I’d have to be cheerful and smiling too and say hello.

My misanthropy — or, rather, my expectation of being misanthropic — was unwarranted. I’d forgotten that if you happen to be walking in the same direction as most of the crowd, and at a roughly similar pace, you might not see anyone for long(ish) periods. In fact, it turned out even better. I met an elderly man (why is it so much more respectful to call someone elderly rather than old?) who was coming towards me on his way back to the carpark; he was  so lost in his slow, poles-assisted plod up the final ascent that he almost walked into me — ‘Sorry!’ he said and I said, ‘No worries!’ cheerfully, both of us smiling, and I resisted the urge to say something like it was good to see him out enjoying the track because I was worried it would sound patronising (it would have). No one else until Tom’s Lookout: a young couple with daypacks and heavy lumpish Nalgene water bottles like high-tech caveman clubs were sitting on the seat and we exchanged hellos as I passed by. The only others I met during the half-hour walk to the table were three older (not yet elderly but getting there) people who’d just finished a selfie when I came up the track around a bend and into view. One looked disconcertingly like Shane Jones but he stepped aside and waved me through with a smile and I mentally forgave him for looking like Shane Jones (which of course was no fault of his — that is, no fault of the man who looked like Shane Jones — and I felt mean for having instantly been wary of him. I was glad he’d given me the opportunity to revise my opinion).

Then there was no one the whole time I was brewing and drinking Lapsang Souchong at the picnic table and scribbling in the notebook, at least not until a tanned, shirtless, glistening man with spiky greying hair walked past going up the main track. We nodded acknowledgment of each other through the shrubbery.

A few more people passed by, some plodding, a couple jogging. A middle-aged couple came up the Tawa track.

‘Lovely spot,’ the man said, pausing and looking at the table and my stuff spread out on it. He had a distinct Irish accent. I agreed it was a lovely spot. They carried on towards the towering metal figure of Whātonga, and I wondered whether they’d wanted to sit at the lovely spot but had been deterred because they wanted to respect my solitude and scribbling and tea-sipping.

‘There’s another table just the other side of Whātonga,’ I called out.

He turned and said something which I took to be either thanks or maybe explaining why they wouldn’t be stopping but he spoke so fast in his gentle Irish accent that I couldn’t catch what exactly he was saying, but his intonation and gestures were reassuring and happy and I felt better about not being thought of as the monopoliser of the lovely spot.

My misanthropy had by then mostly dissipated, although it almost returned when a short, bulbous man shuffled up and began talking to me in a voice possibly audible at the carpark.

‘Having a drink of tea?’ he yelled, and I nodded.

‘That looks like a good camera!’ he said.

I told him it did its job if I did mine, but he didn’t seem to understand.

‘Doing your journalling?’ he yelled, and I nodded again. ‘What do you write about?’

But before I could say ‘whatever comes to mind’ he was making suggestions: ‘The birds! The people you meet on the track!’

“Whatever comes to mind,’ I managed to reply, hoping I didn’t sound unfriendly. I smiled, just in case.

He was OK, though, and seemed genuinely interested in the people he met (he’d just come from explaining to the Irish couple how Whātonga had been vandalised then eventually fixed, and about aspects of the earthquake-proofing of the new bridge), and I was another person to be genuinely interested in. Also, I think he enjoyed the sight of someone enjoying what had, until he’d turned up, been some quiet time, and I found it hard not to appreciate his enthusiasm although I was getting desperate for him to move on. Which he did: he wished me a good day and shuffled on down the Tawa track, poking his walking pole at the ground in front of him like a one-feelered bug probing for morsels. The white noise of cicadas returned, punctuated occasionally by the notes of a tūī and the soft, high-pitched chattering of a pīwakawaka.

I had a chook in the fridge at home, waiting to be roasted, and I needed to get it into the oven. Responsibilities can be a pain sometimes but I still had plenty of time and roasting a chook hardly tests one’s organisational abilities or cooking skills. I finished the tea, packed away the pens, notebook, and stove and set off back to the car. When I turned the ignition on and the dashboard lit up, I saw the temperature was registering twenty-nine degrees[1]. I felt a twinge of empathy for the chook I was about to roast.

---

Notes: 

1. Ngahere: forest, the bush. Here's the pronunciation.
2. That's 29° Celsius (84° Fahrenheit)

Photos (click to enlarge them): 

1. Tūī in the ngahere on the Te Apiti track
2. The lovely spot back in August 2024
3. Pīwakawaka. This was on the No. 1 Line track, a little further north of the Te Apiti track.

Photos and original text © 2026 Pete McGregor

What is it like to be a riroriro?

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

Remembering rivers

At dawn I sit outside remembering how, earlier in the week, I’d walked over the Ngamoko Range to Leon Kinvig hut in the headwaters of the Pohangina river. I had two nights there to myself and sat by the river each evening thinking whatever came to mind. Now I sit in a city and remember how, sitting by that river, I’d remembered the week-long journey with Robb at the other end of the Ruahine in early December; how we’d walked up the Makaroro river one morning, following deer that had walked the same way only a few minutes earlier, and how eventually I’d seen something bright and moving in a pool at the end of the reach a hundred metres ahead — the bills of two whio, bright in the early morning shadow. We’d moved closer, carefully, and watched them until we grew cold then turned back to the hut rather than disturb them by trying to move past upstream. Robb was ecstatic. So was I.

At Kinvig I’d walked upriver to the old hut site early in the morning and, feeling cold and clumsy, had sat in the sun on the riverbank beneath a flowering Marbleleaf. Gradually, the world revealed itself: an iridescent black spider-hunting wasp that wouldn’t pause to allow a photograph; a big crane fly, Zelandotipula fulva, that, perhaps lethargic from the cold, did allow me some photographs; once, dancing overhead and out of sight, a butterfly I was ninety percent sure was a Forest Ringlet. Later in the day I’d see more and could confirm the ID but none of those beautiful butterflies would settle. Then, in the river, at the head of the rapids about 100 metres downstream from the old hut site, where the reach ends and the river curves towards the big slip … a whio. I saw him before he saw me — just. He whistled, climbed out onto a rock, whistled again. Back into the water, out onto a rock just a little downstream; more whistling and craning his neck. I managed a few poor record photos. He floated downstream and I followed a little way but didn’t see him again.

That evening I sat at the river’s edge with biltong and 12-year-old Glenlivet and the sunlight coming and going on the rapids until finally the sun slid behind cloud and crept below the ridge. I wondered why wild water is white. Presumably the bubbles, foaming, reflect the light? Something like that, but I’d never wondered about that before, but that’s what sitting by a mountain river does — you think about things you’d never think to think about elsewhere. But mostly you think of nothing; you sit there and eventually you realise time has passed. You become absorbed by the sound and the incessant, constantly changing movement of the water and your mind loses itself. Is that what meditation’s supposed to be like? I don’t know, but it’ll do me. Is it the same, watching the sea? Probably, but it’s been so long since I’ve sat alone watching the evening sea that I can’t remember. But a river is always going somewhere — downstream, to the sea — but the sea goes nowhere: the waves rush up the beach then slide back down, and even the tide changes its mind twice a day. How might that change the way your mind works when you spend time simply watching the sea?

The light had begun to dim and the malt had almost gone but I was reluctant to climb back to the hut and leave that beautiful river that will keep flowing long after I’m gone. Who else will sit here on evenings like this, letting their thoughts roam, waiting for whio?

.

Evening riverbed the sun still in its boulders

.

---

Photos (click to enlarge): 

1. The pair of whio on the upper Makaroro river, Ruahine Forest Park.
2. Tītitipounamu (Rifleman; Acanthisitta chloris ssp. granti); female, near Leon Kinvig hut
3. Rapids below Leon Kinvig hut

Photos and original text © 2026 Pete McGregor

Forgetting

At the top of the No. 1 Line track I set up the rain kilt as a groundsheet with the little pad of closed cell foam as a seat and the camera holding it down so it wouldn’t blow away in the cool breeze. I took the stove out and set it up on the ground with the homemade windshield and got water heating for tea, and I sat down and reached into the bag for the notebook. 

That’s when I remembered I’d forgotten to pack the pen roll. 

You can get wild with yourself for being an idiot, but eventually you have to face it: you have no pens and can’t do the writing you were so looking forward to doing. It’s a good lesson in several ways, I suppose, but the best that could be said regarding my response was that I got over it fairly quickly. I still berated myself for being an idiot, for not paying appropriate attention to that uneasy feeling I’d forgotten something — almost always an accurate indicator that you have forgotten something and should check again — but, having forgotten other things on other occasions, I’ve learned to move on quickly and to look for a more positive way of looking at the stuff-up. Once, I forgot the tea; that time I tried brewing kawakawa leaves, with acceptable results. Another time I forgot to fill the water bottle and at the top of the No. 1 Line track there’s no recovery from that — the nearest water’s a long way off and without water how do you brew tea? Disaster! A good lesson in acceptance. 

This time I rummaged through the bag in the futile hope I might have stashed a pen somewhere but I knew I hadn’t and soon accepted that I’d have to do the writing elsewhere, later in the day. But I wasn’t about to let that take the edge off the walk. I had the place to myself — during the entire walk as well as the drive up and down the road I saw no one; it was as if humans had vanished from the world — and a pheasant rooster had strolled across the road and disappeared into long weeds ahead of the car, and two feisty little piwakawaka had given me a delightful what-for a few minutes along the track, and, shortly afterwards, a smallish bird flitted into a tangle of branches on the side of the track. I peered at it, thinking it might have been a riroriro but it was too big. 

It was a Pīpīwharauroa, a Shining cuckoo. I unclipped the camera, thinking surely the bird would do that frustrating thing of posing right up until the moment you’re about to get it in sharp focus. But it stayed while I managed a single photograph, then it flitted a few centimetres along the branch to where it was partly obscured by twigs. None of the three additional photographs were of an acceptable standard but I didn’t mind, and as I sat at the top of track drinking tea and not writing, I thought this had been a mighty fine walk after all.

---

Note: The Pīpīwharauroa or Shining cuckoo (Chalcites lucidus ssp. lucidus) is a subspecies of Shining Bronze-cuckoo. This subspecies breeds only in Aotearoa New Zealand, where it lays eggs in the nests of Riroriro (Grey warbler), and spends the winter in the Bismarck Archipelago, near New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. 

Photo: The first and only usable photograph of the Pīpīwharauroa. Click it for a better view. 

Photos and original text © 2025 Pete McGregor

An evening by the river

The big beech that had been threatening the helipad had been felled by the crew who had cut the new track from the tops down to the hut and the tree’s canopy now lay partly over the river bank. A riroriro had set up a territory in the tangle of branches and was singing furiously and squabbling with another that also appeared keen on the prime location. I watched the tiny birds fighting and chasing each other and saw more riroriro on the far side of the river doing the same thing — on one occasion three birds were engaged in a dogfight so aerobatic that I couldn’t follow any particular bird for more than a second or two. We think we’re amazing because we can fly fast and high over vast distances but these little birds — just a few grams of feathers and aggression — make us look like lumbering oafs.

I turned away to watch the river, hoping a whio might appear but mostly just because watching a mountain river in the evening, with a comfortable hut waiting and no responsibilities, is one of the most meditative and peaceful experiences I know (although that seemed lost on the riroriro). You watch the flow for a while and then you realise time has passed and all you’ve done is sit there and that’s perfect. You lift your eyes and the far bank starts flowing backwards, upstream, as if your mind has to make up for all that time watching the world flowing downstream, and the slight giddiness feels like the first hit of getting high. 

Clouds raced eastwards high overhead in the dimming sky and a cold wind swirled around but couldn’t get through my down jacket. I imagined Robb here with his nibbles (jerky, sharp cheese, olives) and his wee dram and his ecstatic enthusiasm and how if a whio appeared he’d become enraptured and almost mystical with joy and I’d know how he felt. If John were here as well, the evening might be impossible to surpass — just three old mates enjoying the evening and yarning in one of the best places in the world.

I thought of my sister, too. She’d never known places like this but she loved hearing about them. During one of our last conversations she’d asked me to tell her about my travels in India and I told her how I used to love walking down the back alley behind Main Bazaar to eat at one of the magnificently efficient little open-fronted restaurants opposite New Delhi Railway Station. The guys would recognise me and beam widely and look after me and I’d eat dahl and rice and a naan straight from the tandoor and watch the teeming crazy life on the street and I’d wonder why on earth I loved it so much when I loved evenings on the banks of a Ruahine river just as much. I didn’t say that at the time, and we didn’t get all philosophical or zen or whatever during that conversation, but now I think to compare experiences is to miss the point, which is that nothing compares to the moment you’re experiencing right now. She lay back, listening and smiling, and I hoped what I was saying reminded her of wonderful times on her own travels. Less than a week later she was gone.

The riroriro were still fighting and singing and the gorgeously clear river still flowed down towards the bend and on to the gorge and the wind still tugged my hair and pushed at the bulk of my jacket. I wanted to tell her about all of it and see that quiet, delighted smile again but that was no longer possible. I found myself wondering: what’s the point of these marvellous moments if you can’t share them with the people you love?

---

Notes: 

1. Riroriro are also known as Grey warblers, although they're not warblers (some ornithologists insist on calling them 'Grey gerygone'). The scientific name is Gerygone igata. Here's the New Zealand Birds Online entry.
2. The hut is Leon Kinvig hut in the headwaters of the Pohangina River, Ruahine Forest Park.

Photos: 

1 & 2. Both photos are of the Riroriro that had set up in the canopy of the felled beech.

Photos and original text © 2025 Pete McGregor