More About Birds

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 513, 22 April 1949, Page 14

More About Birds

‘THE thing that marks Bryan O’Brien out. among radio commentators is his child-like enthusiasm for his subjects and his ability to communicate it to his hearers. His latest programme Kapiti Island Sanctuary was first-rate reporting, though I thought Mr. O’Brien’s talent showed to better advantage when he was actually taking his roving microphone through the bush and establishing firsthand contacts with the birds than in the introductory part of the broadcast, Perhaps I was stung by Mr. O’Brien’s (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) comment, that Wellingtonians, speeding down the coast road, regard Kapiti as "a landmark of no particular interest or significance,’ whereas I should prefer to attribute their apparent indifference to a resolute refusal to cry for the moon or a landing permit that would probably be refused. Mr. O’Brien (one of the privileged classes) reached the island at noon, when there was comparatively little bird-song, but before he left it the following day had succeeded in ‘trapping into the mictophone the songs of tui and robin, the whirr of pigeon wings, and, most impressive of all, the two-note ¢all of the kaka, one of the wildest of our

native birds, whom Mrs. Lindsay, the curator’s wife, had trained to sing for his supper. (Equally impressive to the sybarite was Mrs. Lindsay’s — story of getting out of bed at midnight on a wet night when she heard the kaka call, at an unaccustomed hour, for his accustomed food. For thé many who will never set foot on Kapiti Mr. O’Brien’s programme was a revelation both of the richness and vatiety of our bird-life and of the care that goés into keeping it so.