‘Keas!’ he says. I nod but only very slightly. My head already has quite enough contrary motions to contend with.
`They’re mountain parrots,’ says Mark. ‘Very intelligent birds with long curved beaks. They can rip the windscreen wipers off cars and often do.’
I’m always startled by the speed with which Mark is able to recognise birds he’s never seen before, even when they’re just a speck in the distance.
‘The wing beat is very distinctive,’ he explains. ‘But it would be even easier to identify them if we weren’t in a helicopter with all this noise. It’s one of those birds which very helpfully calls out its own name when it’s flying. Kea! Kea! Kea! Birdwatchers love them for that. It would be great if the Pallas’s grasshopper warbler would learn the same trick. Make warbler identification a lot easier.’ He follows them for a few seconds more, until they round a large outcrop and disappear from view. He puts down his binoculars. They are not what we have come to look for.
`Interesting birds, though, with some odd habits. Very fussy about getting the design of their nests right. There was one kea nest that was found which the birds had started to build in 1958. In 1965 they were still sorting it out and adding bits to it but hadn’t actually moved in yet. Bit like you in that respect.’
As we reach the narrow end of the ravine we pause briefly a few yards from a cataract crashing down its sides to fill the river hundreds of feet beneath us. We peer out at it from our floating glass bubble and I feel suddenly like a visitor from another planet, descending from the sky to study the minutiae of an alien world. I also feel sick but decide to keep this information to myself.
With a slight shrug Bill heaves the helicopter way up out of the ravine and into the clear air again. The sheer immensity of the volumes of rock and space that turn easily around us continually overwhelms the spatial processors of the brain. And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you’re doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs.
We are skimming over the tops of glaciers. The sudden splurge of light blinds us for a moment, but when the light coalesces into solid shapes they are like shapes from dreams. Great top-heavy towers resembling the deformed torsos of giants; huge sculpted caves and arches; and here and there the cracked and splayed remains of what looks like a number of Gothic cathedrals dropped from a considerable height: but all is snow and ice. It’s as if the ghosts of Salvador Dali and Henry Moore come here at night with the elements and play.
I have the instinctive reaction of Western man when confronted with the sublimely incomprehensible: I grab my camera and start to photograph it. I feel I’ll be able to cope with it all more easily when it’s just two square inches of colour on a light box and my chair isn’t trying to throw me round the room.
Gaynor, our radio producer, thrusts a microphone at me and asks me to describe what we’re looking at.
°What? I say, and gibber slightly.
`More,’ she says, `more!’
I gibber some more. The blades of the helicopter rotor are spinning mere inches from a tower of ice.
She sighs. ‘Well, it will probably edit up into something,’ she says and turns the tape off’ again.
We take one more mind-wrenching turn around the giant ice sculptures and then head off down the ravines once more, which now seem almost domestic by comparison.
There is one other passenger in the aircraft: Don Merton, a benign man with the air of a vicar apologising for something. He sits quietly, occasionally pushing his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and murmuring, `Yes, ah yes,’ to himself, as if this all confirmed something he’d always rather suspected. In fact he knows the area very well. He works for the New Zealand Department of Conservation and has probably done more than any man living to preserve the threatened birds of New Zealand.