We love the stories about our godwits flying all the way from Alaska to Aotearoa, don’t we? What an amazing feat we say. All that way without stopping, we say. Welcome home, wonderful little birds we say.
Sometimes we care a lot about nature and its silly little animals, sometimes we don’t care at all, especially if we are Shane Jones, elected representative of oil companies and fishing fleets.
In Keith Woodley’s In Pursuit of Champions he describes visiting locations in South Koreas where the birds have arrived at feeding grounds that are no more, laid waste by developers. He also describes a change brought on in the Arctic by global warming: the spring melt now comes sooner. That means that the short time the waters are abundant with food has also come forward. But the arrival time for the godwits has not. There has been no email alert for the godwits. Hell of a long way to go to find there’s no food in the shops, eh.
