Kōtare

Kōtare are highly versatile manu and have survived drastic human environmental changes. They live in native and exotic forests, on farmlands, by lakes and streams and on tidal mudflats.

In the 1870s, the Acclimatisation Society of Whanganui introduced a bounty for killing kōtare because they were attacking the sparrows that the society had recently gone to great efforts to introduce from Europe and Australia. Thus the kōtare are part of a larger story about the disastrous Pākehā enthusiasm for importing birds and all manner of other fauna and flora and the history of Māori protest against these actions.

Māori compared a kōtare to a watchful sentry, and a high lookout platform in a pā was referred to as a kōtare. Kōtare squabs (fledglings) were taken and cooked in hāngī, while the brilliant blue feathers were in demand for use to decorate clothing and for fishing lures.

The saying ‘he kōtare koe’ is used of a person who turns up and watches others eat in the hope of getting some – a comparison with how a kōtare sits motionless on a branch, its gimlet eyes searching out food.

Māori children, on seeing a kōtare nest tunnel, would call ‘putaputa kōtare, putaputa kōtare’ (come out kōtare, come out kōtare) and also sang a rain ditty about the kōtare, seen as an omen of fine weather on the way.

Image: Todiramphus sanctus (Sacred Kingfisher)