The flight of the Kuaka

The obvious answer to a taxing question

When out walking near the sea I often converse with people I meet. Sometimes I talk about the rights to the apparently common land on which we walk. As the conversation evolves, occasionally I pose this question: how did the original inhabitants of Aotearoa-New Zealand, the Māori, find New Zealand?  Knowing they did not have the instruments available to Abel Tasman or James Cook the answer I am often given is: they followed the stars.  Whereupon I say you cannot follow the stars to a place you don’t know is there.  A quizzical look usually clouds the faces of the responder. I then offer an explanation.  I came to the answer based on my own observation which I found to be supported by Māori myth.  What I do not accept is the theory which is termed ‘one-way’ voyaging which posits that the migrants sailed off into the unknown and chanced upon Aotearoa.  The chances of success at such an endeavour are vanishingly small.

I spend a good deal of my time on the foreshore of the Manukau Harbour, Auckland photographing the wildlife.  Usually my photographic subjects include Kōtare (kingfisher), Karoro (black-backed gull), Motuku-moana (heron), Tōrea (pied oyster-catcher), Poaka (pied stilt) and so on.  One bird I rarely see is the Kuaka, otherwise known as the bar-tailed godwit.  It is not that they are uncommon on the Manukau Harbour but they are just not common to the places I frequent.  They are not my favourite bird to photograph, not least because they wade where the tide is at its lowest ebb tide.  The mud is deep out there and they are skittish, taking flight before I am ready. But the main reason is because they are dowdy in appearance, having a rather dull mottled brown colouring which is not especially photogenic.

Nonetheless what they lack in physical appearance they more than make up in physical capacity.  They are remarkable animals.  They spend the summer here and then migrate to their breeding grounds in Alaska and Siberia.  They may rest on the journey back north. North Korea has them visit.  But they do not rest on the journey south.  They travel up to 12,000 kilometers (about 7,500 miles) in their journey which takes about 9 or 10 days.  They take an easterly path when flying south and there is no place to land.  In contrast to, say, Toroa (albatross) they cannot surface on the sea as they are shore birds not seabirds.  Therein lies the secret.

The legendary explorer who is said to have found Aotearoa is named Kupe.  Whether he existed or not cannot be known.  I suspect he is more a composite figure in reality, meaning that the knowledge that enabled the explorations was communal rather than individual and developed over generations and not just one.  Otherwise my theory is consistent with the myth.  It is said that the kuaka were observed flying over a small inhabited Pacific Island on their journey south.  I suspect there was more than one observation and were more likely made at sea rather than on land.  The observer, or observers, knew the kuaka could not come to earth on the sea.  Accordingly, they had to be going to land.  It was then a matter of following them.

Ko te kaupapa waka kit e moana hoe ai ko te kahui atua kit e ranga rere ai

Whilst the fleet of canoes over the ocean are paddled, the flocks of gods are above in the heavens flying[i]

It is not possible to follow them in sea borne craft as they fly at about 45 kilometres per hour (30 mph).  Also it would be difficult to follow them at night though the myth holds that they cry out and the cries give the direction.  They do fly in large flocks in the V formation for obvious reasons.  There are thousands of them and, back then, there may have been millions.  I surmise that the knowledge was accumulated slowly by progressively aligning the flight path with the stars.  I think to ascribe all the knowledge to a single individual, whilst expedient for myth, underestimates the achievement.  I doubt it was only the Kuaka which acted as guide.  There is another migrant Koekoeā (the long-tailed cuckoo) which travels between Pacific Islands and Aotearoa, spending the summer here to breed and then returning north for the winter.  The inhabitants of the Pacific Islands would have been very familiar with the species.

Also other sources of knowledge would have been important.  Seabirds, whilst poor guides, would have given valuable information concerning the whereabouts of land.  Toroa would not be useful in that respect but Karoro, for instance, would be.  Mammals of the sea and other creatures may have also imparted useful information.  After all Aotearoa was only the last place to be found.  The Pacific peoples spread out across the whole of the Pacific by some means or other.

Meteorological knowledge must  also have been a factor.  Seafarers crossing vast oceanic distances need to be have an intimate knowledge of the weather simply to survive.  Critical is an understanding of cloud formations.  As it happens the very word Aotearoa is meteorological in origin.  It translates to ‘the land of the long white cloud’.  Once, I had a casual conversation on the wharf at Wellington harbour where I happened to be photographing an interesting cloud formation as dusk gathered.  An old man near me watched as I took the photographs and he said: ‘you know that is a lenticular cloud?’ which of course I didn’t know.  He told me that they form over land which seems to be right as wind currents crossing mountains give rise to them and the intrepid Māori seafarers would have known that.  He then said: ‘it is that particular cloud that gave the name to the land’.  Made sense to me.

There is a long running debate in Aotearoa about whether there is such a thing as Māori science.  Some say that science is an abstraction built from rigorous application of mathematics and experimentation.  It would not therefore include the practical and the pragmatic. There was a proposal to give equal prominence to mātauranga Māori (traditional knowledge) compared to traditional Western science. I suspect they are not the same thing but I think seeing the world through different eyes has value and, you never know, traditional knowledge may become very much more important than quantum mechanics if the path humanity walks down has as many horrors in store as I fear.

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[i] http://www.hekuaka.co.nz/the-flight-of-he-kuaka/background