‘Dedicated Naturalist’: Laugh with the kookaburra

26 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by sconzani in 'Dedicated Naturalist' Project, birds, nature

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Australian birds, autograph book, Dr Mary Gillham, Explore Your Archives, Mary Gillham Archive Project

A snippet from my volunteer work on the ‘Dedicated Naturalist’: Mary Gillham Archives Project, to celebrate Explore Your Archive, a campaign co-ordinated jointly by The National Archives and the Archives and Records Association that aims ‘to showcase the unique potential of archives to excite people, bring communities together, and tell amazing stories’.

I just love this piece Mary wrote in the autograph book of Lynette A. Smith, from the small town of Lady Barron, on Flinders Island, Australia, on 18 December 1958. Not only does it show Mary’s keen observation of bird life (also apparent in her drawings), but it also offers some interesting pearls of wisdom.

161126-gillham-gannets

Pursue your ideals as a gannet dives for fish – straight and undeviating;
Show constancy of purpose, like a mutton bird returning yearly to the same burrow;
Seek diligently for what is worthwhile as the Cape Barren goose seeks titbits of vegetation;
Guard your morals jealously against the tempter, as the oyster-catcher guards its eggs against intruders;
Go about your business without fuss, like a storm petrel flitting through the night;
Be patient as the penguin chick waiting for mum to come home with supper;
Be decorative, like the tern which cleaves the air in soaring flight;
Be thrifty like the silver gull which leaves no fruitful possibility unexplored;
Laugh with the kookaburra, sing with the magpie and you will soar as high as the sea eagle.

For the full story about the Mary Gillham Archive Project, check out our website, and follow our progress on Facebook and on Twitter.

‘Dedicated Naturalist’: Paradise found

19 Saturday Nov 2016

Posted by sconzani in 'Dedicated Naturalist' Project, birds, nature

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Blue Penguin, Dr Mary Gillham, Explore Your Archives, Mary Gillham Archive Project, Mary Gillham in New Zealand, Naturalist in New Zealand, Ringa Ringa Beach

Dr Mary Gillham spent 1957 in my homeland, New Zealand and, though officially on an exchange lecturership at Massey University, she also used her time for field research into the country’s unique flora and fauna. Mary had a particular passion for seabirds so the huge range of avian life to be found along New Zealand’s lengthy coastline must have seemed like paradise found.

161119-royal-albatrosses

Within weeks of her arrival she was marvelling at a magnificent male Royal Albatross on Otago Peninsula with ranger Stanley Sharpe: ‘a lone male was sitting out on the hillside and we were able to watch it at close quarters for almost an hour – he, having no natural enemies, taking little notice of us’; and, a week later, delighting in the antics of penguins at Ringa Ringa Beach on Stewart Island (pictured below): ‘[we] were entertained by a yellow crested penguin who had come inshore to moult and wasn’t going back to sea for any humans’.

161119 Mary Gillham at Ringa Ringa

Mary was unsettled by the kakas on Kapiti Island: ‘it was most disconcerting to be firing the [camera] trigger at a couple of wekas and a tui with a kaka landing plomp on my head’; and entertained by blue penguins on The Brothers: ‘2 of them ran into a fallen Hebe bough and one got annoyed and blamed the other, leaping across his back and then slapping the bird’s sides with resounding thwacks of his flippers’. (Mary’s sketch of them is shown below.)

When she eventually returned to Britain, Mary wrote a book about her Kiwi adventures (A Naturalist in New Zealand, Museum Press, London and Reed Books, New Zealand, 1966). Not surprisingly, a painting of birds graces its cover.

For the full story about the Mary Gillham Archive Project, check out our website, and follow our progress on Facebook and on Twitter.