Often, it is only the bird’s movement that will alert you. On the broad reaches of braided riverbeds, wrybills, with their grey backs and white bellies, are superbly cryptic. Among the swathes of gravel and ground-hugging plants, nests may be impossible to see. Unless the incubating bird moves. The eggs and chicks are similarly cryptic – precisely adapted to that environment. Youngsters scarper and stumble over the stony flats, freezing into invisibility if a parent alarms. Then there is that peculiar bill.
There occurs in the avian kingdom a great diversity of bills – shape, size, length, colour, structure. There are the improbable spoonbills, the bizarre toucans or the far eastern curlew, where the bill seems to go on forever. But only wrybills – ngutu pare, unique and found only…
