The Drunk Pigeon Who Planted Our Street

The Drunk Pigeon Who Planted Our Street

A kereru full of fermented puriri berries fell onto my neighbour's car, and we found out who really does the gardening around here.

The afternoon was warm enough that the tar on the road had gone soft, and I was at my letterbox pretending to sort recycling when I heard the thump. A heavy one, like a coconut landing on a tin roof, then a pause, then a faint sliding sound.

Mr. Mummu's little hatchback was parked where it always is, half under the big puriri on the berm. On its roof sat a kereru, round as a feijoa, staring straight ahead with the look of someone who has just remembered they left the stove on.

A door banged and Mummu came out with his notebook, the one titled "Urgent" that is mostly shopping lists and reminders to buy more notebooks. He stopped on the porch. The bird didn't move. Its white chest rose and fell. The green and bronze on its neck caught the light like old furniture polish, and its bright red feet gripped the roof rack as if the car might drive off without it.

"One minute," Mummu said, and went back inside.

Twelve minutes later he came out with a cup of water and a teaspoon. He looked up at the bird, then at me, then at the bird again.

"Should we call someone to breathalyse it?"

I already had my phone out. This is what I do when the fog won't clear on its own. I look things up until it does, standing on the footpath in my jandals while the neighbour holds a teaspoon.

One line on the Science Learning Hub had the answer. Kereru sometimes gorge so heavily on ripe fruit that it ferments inside them in the hot sun, and they've been known to fall out of trees. Auckland Zoo's page went further and called them the drunkest bird in New Zealand.

"So he's had a few," Mummu said.

"Berries. Puriri berries." I pointed up. The tree was heavy with them, dark red clusters, a lot of them already squashed into purple stains on his windscreen.

He looked at the windscreen for a long time.

Once I start reading out loud I can't really stop, so I kept going. An average kereru weighs about 630 grams and can be up to about 510 millimetres long, which explained the thump. They have the widest gape of any native bird in the country. That wide mouth is the whole point. According to the Department of Conservation, since the moa went extinct the kereru (and its Chatham Islands cousin, the parea) are the only birds left big enough to swallow large fruit like karaka, miro, tawa and taraire and carry the seed a long way. DOC says losing them could be a disaster for the regeneration of our native forests.

That's a lot of responsibility for a bird currently sitting on a Mummu car with its eyes half shut.

Up on the roof, the bird made a small noise, somewhere between a hiccup and a coo. Mummu lowered the teaspoon.

So I rang a local bird rescue. The woman who answered had the calm voice of someone who'd already taken five calls about pigeons that week. If it isn't injured, she said, it usually just needs time to sleep it off somewhere safe. Give it quiet and space. Keep cats away.

His cat was the next job: a large white menace called Chairman, asleep on the windowsill and for once not plotting anything. Mummu carried him inside with the gravity of a man moving a piano, shut the door, and came back to stand beside me on the berm.

"I tried to grow one of these trees once," he said. "Properly. A karaka, from a seed. I bought the special seed-raising mix. I wrote a watering schedule in the Urgent book, three times a week, with boxes to tick. I moved the pot around the deck all day to follow the sun, like a satellite dish." He tapped the notebook. "One whole year. Nothing. Not even a crack." He paused. "And then something comes up by itself in the gutter of my shed. A little tree. I never planted it. I never watered it. It's growing out of rust and leaves." He pointed the teaspoon at the bird on his roof. "So that was you." The kereru blinked at him, slowly. Mummu nodded as if they'd agreed on something. "The forest gets planted by the ones who aren't trying," he said. "My job is to keep the cat inside."

We stood there for about forty minutes. Mummu offered me tea twice and didn't go and make it either time, because neither of us wanted to miss anything.

Auckland Zoo's page said kereru are mostly quiet, apart from the whoosh of their wings and a soft coo. I'd never noticed the coo. I'd heard the wings plenty of times, that heavy beating overhead you get in Auckland gardens, like someone shaking out a wet towel. I'd never once looked up long enough to wonder what they were doing for the place.

Here's the part I hadn't known. After a big feed, according to Kereru Discovery, a kereru flies off to a favourite roost to digest, and what it drops later is a seed with its own little package of fertiliser. That's how new seedlings get started in places no one planted. Auckland Zoo says they can travel up to 70 kilometres in a day, which is a long way to carry a seed in your stomach.

I'll be honest about the limits of what I worked out on that footpath. I don't know which bird planted which tree. Nobody does. The puriri over Mummu's car might have been planted by a person, back when the street was paddocks. But the gully at the end of our road, with its karaka and its taraire and whatever that thing is with the glossy leaves, I'd always thought of it as leftover bush, a bit nobody got round to clearing. Standing there, it looked more like a garden that birds had been keeping for a very long time, one dropping at a time, without a schedule or a single tick box.

It's also illegal to hunt kereru now, which felt like the least we owe them.

Eventually the bird shuffled to the edge of the roof. It shook its head once, twice, like a dog coming out of the sea. Then it opened its wings, and there was the whoosh, loud enough to make Mummu step back, and it lifted off in a wobbly line that cleared the power cable by a hand's width and dipped over his fence towards the gully.

Neither of us said anything until it was gone.

Back on his porch he opened the Urgent notebook and wrote something. I leaned over to read it. He'd drawn a fat pigeon with crosses for eyes, an arrow pointing to a tree, and underneath, in his careful hand: "Shed gutter. Do not clean."

Next morning the purple stains were still on his windscreen. He hadn't washed them off. He said he was leaving them for a bit, in case anyone needed to find their way home.