New Zealand rendezvous with "flocks of gods"

In most Washington estuaries, the mud is brown, squelchy, and deep.

Likewise in New Zealand, at the Firth of Thames near Auckland, where I was trying to excavate my shoes after a series of badly chosen steps. When you're stuck in it, all mud seems about the same.

But a closer look at the stuff there showed its local qualities. During the ebb tide, acres of mud flat were stippled with the shells of small mollusks. I wasn't the first to have noticed this. Thousands of waterbirds had gathered to feed — ducks and herons, terns and gulls, knots and wrybills and godwits.

We were there to see the bar-tailed godwits. (Or, to be fair, I was there to see them, and my wife, since she's a good sport and also because my bird-watching amuses her, had come along, too.) I'd run into them before on the Long Beach Peninsula — they show up every so often on migration — and it was a treat to see them again.

The sun and sky were cold, the wind whipped sharp across the grasses. It was winter in June, and the birds had segregated themselves in varying states of climatic resistance. Most puffed out their feathers and huddled against the wind, but a few of hardier stock were out in the water.

The godwits were among those. They were easy to identify: a loose flock of large, slender birds with long, upswept bills. Their plumage is gray, mottled with brown and black. They stepped with graceful, deliberate precision, and then thrust their heads into the mud in pursuit of some worm or clam.

The first people to discover New Zealand owed much to these birds.

Legend has it that the ancestors of the Maori, living on a nearby barrier island at the time, observed the annual southward passage of what they called the kuaka. Surely all those birds aren't just circling the earth, they thought, so they hopped into their big outriggers, set sail, and found New Zealand. One saying goes, "As the fleet of canoes paddles the ocean, the flocks of gods fly overhead."

It was reasonable then to assume that no bird could fly forever, but if one comes close, it is the godwit. After they breed on the Alaskan tundra, godwits fly all the way to New Zealand across the Pacific, nonstop. I can't quite get my head around that. The birds weigh a little more than a pound. They are in the air for six days.

My wife and I had faced a similar relocation. We were married the fall before, and a week later moved to Auckland for the year. It was a quick change, our migration mirroring the godwits' in a way. Had we flown a lot lower and slower instead of in a jumbo jet, we might have seen their echelons in silhouette. But we were too high, too fast, zoning out on bad movies and plastic food.

Now, we watched the godwits probe the mud. We studied their delicate and intense vitality.

Our time in Auckland was almost over. In August, we would return to Seattle. As we did, the first flights of godwits would start to return from the north. And again, perhaps, our plane would pass over those flocks as they made their way to New Zealand, two groups navigating over the featureless space of ocean, flying toward different homes.

Eric Wagner lives in Issaquah.

The Travel Essay, written by readers about an adventure or insight, runs each Sunday in The Seattle Times and also online at seattletimes.com. Essays, which are unpaid, must be no longer than 600 words and will be edited for content and length. E-mail to travel@seattletimes.com or send to Travel, The Essay, The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111.