Wild New Zealand: Forest Birds

Before the kea owned the alpine, it belonged to the trees.

"Wild New Zealand: Forest Birds" is the first volume in the Wild New Zealand series, covering thirty species whose stronghold is New Zealand's native bush. Not the birds that adapted to suburbs and gardens, though some of them visit. The ones that looked at the edge of the forest and went back in. The ones whose biology still makes most sense inside the green.

The grey warbler weighs six grams and raises cuckoo chicks larger than its own head. The kōkako sings a note so low you feel it in the chest before you identify it with the ears. The kārearea is the only falcon in the world that hunts in forest, threading the canopy at speed with a conviction that leaves no room for hesitation. The kākāpō forgot how to fly. The South Island kōkako may be gone. The rifleman weighs less than a pencil and has been quietly getting on with things since before humans arrived to start taking notes.

This is not a guidebook. There are no distribution maps, no measurement tables, no standardised species accounts. Other books do that. This one asks what the forest actually gave these birds - what they still carry in their bones and behaviours from millions of years of green silence - and what has been taken from them in the two centuries since the forest started disappearing.

The answers are not always comforting. Some of these species are surviving by luck, by sustained human intervention, by sheer biological stubbornness. Some are not surviving at all. This book does not hide that. It also does not perform grief. That would be unfair to the birds.

Thirty species. Thirty arguments for paying attention differently.

Each entry includes a Te Ao Māori note, a practical conservation section, and an illustration. The book is designed to be read as literature, used as a reference, and returned to.

"Wild New Zealand: Forest Birds" is written by Tom Reiber and published by Thornevald Publishing, Matakana, New Zealand.