references
Singing for Keas
Martin Curtis
The great thing about volunteers in the cause of conservation is that we all offer different skills or strengths that we can bring to help out – in my case, apart from the more recently acquired building skills in maintaining old buildings like the Cardrona Hall and Cascade Hut, it is my music that I can utilise most. When I first became interested in folk music, far more years ago than I really care to remember, I soon became aware that music and song can be a very powerful medium through which to convey serious messages to a wider population. I was inspired by the songs of Bob Dylan and his cutting comments about the futility of war and social issues. Later I met and befriended Scots/Australian singer songwriter Eric Bogle, with his incredibly moving songs about subjects such as Gallipoli, poverty, social injustices and the like, often done with a touch of wry humour that subtly disguised the message he was putting across. Several of Eric’s songs were about saving the environment, stopping the slaughter of whales and looking after the planet and these made a big impact on me. Due to Eric’s influence I soon began writing my own songs and, because of my interest in mountaineering, bush walking and New Zealand’s wildlife, inevitably I started to write the occasional song about our native birds and our unique bush, forest and mountain environment. In 1994 I had enough material to release a themed CD called ‘Save the Wilderness’ which, to my pleasant surprise, became very popular. DOC started to stock it in some of their visitor centres, and National Radio regularly played some of the tracks on air, particularly my songs about the kakapo, and the epic story about saving the black robins in the Chatham Islands. Through
this song I became a good friend of Don Merton and was inspired by what he had managed to achieve in helping several of our threatened native species. However the most popular item on this album was my humorous story of two keas on a hut roof, trying to find out what was making the noise inside the hut. I almost never do a concert either to adult audiences or to children in schools, here or overseas, without including this poem, which invariably makes people laugh – and hopefully come to love and respect these wonderful birds more. I still get very concerned that the kea seems to attract more negative publicity than our other native birds, and doesn’t get the support that it increasingly needs to avoid becoming critically endangered. To me it should be treated as a New Zealand icon as much as the kiwi – it is certainly more intelligent and much more likely to be seen by the general public. A few years ago I was appalled to read an article in a magazine that spelled out the serious predicament that the kea now finds itself in. It had been quite obvious to me on my regular mountaineering trips that there were not as many around as there were 20 years ago, and for me the trips were the poorer for lacking interaction with the aptly named clown of the mountains. So I composed a song called ‘The Plight of the Kea.’ The reaction from audiences at my concerts was quite overwhelming – mainly astonishment that there was even a problem with kea numbers as (quote) ‘we always see them when we go skiing!’ and real concern that we must act. To me that’s the major issue we face; that due to the kea’s inclination to hang around humans and investigate human 21