I think Mik might turn me into a birder yet.
I photographed this dotterel in the Coromandel I had not even heard of birding when she presented me with the idea for what became our first solo series: Two Old Twitchers A Cuckoo In The Nest. But now...
Birds in Kaiaua on NZ's Firth of Thames Somewhere during the production of the first two Twitchers books, Mik became an amateur birder.

Even during the writing of the first two books of our second series: The Maudlin Wives Inn (an Esther Quill mystery series) Mik continued birding.

Somewhere along the way, she set herself The Little List challenge: to see all 395 New Zealand species of bird. From scratch. And began tweeting the process.


Soon, with me on driving and camera duties, the short person in the back with the bird identification books and Mik surgically attached to her bins, it began. The slow but remarkably painless secret agenda of turning me and the short one into birders.
The bird Mik affectionately named "No Feet." It was okay for the short one because she has an incredible memory for any bird she's ever seen in a picture and can identify any features an artist or photographer had managed to present on paper or screen.

When my enthusiasm waned, Mik discovered the remarkable power of suggesting to her former-audio-producer-husband that the sounds would be great to record.

Now, I find myself waking up at 2am at the softest sound of nocturnal bird and recording for 10 minutes before crawling back into bed happy for having archived yet another bird sound. 

I wake up and then it dawns on me: I had no known reason for recording the little morepork sitting on the edge of the bush near our hillside home. Seriously, what am I going to do with a recording of a morepork? Or a dawn chorus beneath the Pinnacles on the Coromandel Peninsula. Or the sounds of the seabirds on the (unhelpfully named) shorebird coast of the Hauraki Gulf?

Something weird's going on.

I think Mik is succeeding in turning me into a birder. Sort of.

Drew