Country Life: Muttonbirding – ‘It’s a part of who we are’

The tītī, also known as the sooty shearwater, is one of the world’s largest migratory birds, and they come down to the islands around Rakiura Stewart Island to nest and lay a single egg around October.

“Rakiura Māori have been harvesting the tītī for nearly half a millennia, so for 500 years and our tikanga is all about sustainable practice and passing down that knowledge,” Tarrant said.

“The focus for me, is to teach the next generation and just purely a food source.”

Tarrant said their focus is also on keeping the practice sustainable. They don’t use the nanao method of plucking the chicks from underground burrows.

“We’re only here for the rama or the torching season, so we don’t nanao, which is putting your hands in the hole during the daylight. We just don’t feel that this island is sustainable to be able to harvest the birds like that.

“We predominantly bird in the stormy, overcast, rainy nights, and we start around 8 o’clock at night, and we could potentially bird right through the daylight the next day, depending on how we’re going. We run around in the dark with torches and we spotlight them with our hands. Everything is done by hand.”

For some of the time, the whole whānau including tamariki are involved, living in a small hut.

“My family are a big part of it. I had all the kids here, mokopuna the whole lot, and they jumped off on Anzac Day, so they had the very start of the torching season.”

All the processing is done by hand as soon as the birds are caught. When plucking, the children wear hoods to stop fluff, down and feathers getting in their eyes, nose, mouth and ears.

“Everybody hates plucking birds by hand, but it’s the place where everyone talks and we talk about the stories of the past that were handed down to us […] a lot of history and stories are told in the pluck house.

“Instead of just being out there all night, killing and killing, and harvesting the tītī, and then coming back and using a machine, our best practice is to harvest … what we can, actually work with our hands.”

After plucking, the tītī are dipped in wax and then de-waxed to get the skin “nice and clean, so, when we go to eat them, we’re not chewing on feathers”.

Tarrant said tītī is a staple food for his family and it will be preserved to be eaten throughout the year. For others, it is brought out at celebrations or tangi.

“My favourite way is just to have a boiled fresh bird with tomato relish on toast for breakfast. Bit of salt. That’s it.”

He said they might harvest about 1000 birds over the month, all going well. With the family’s focus on keeping the island pest free, thousands more grow on and migrate like their mothers, he reckoned.

“This practice absolutely is sustainable in this day and age, especially the way we harvest and we process our birds.

“The majority of the birds will come off, and we will only work what we can kill. So, there’d be times at night where we’re walking past birds that will get away and free just purely because we’re not out to wreck the island and to devastate the tītī.

“It’s about passing on our heritage, our genealogy, and it’s a part of who we are.”

Their last job is to clear out the burrows after the young birds are gone in preparation for the mothers arriving again in the spring.

“It’s really important that we keep it going, because once it’s lost, it’s lost forever.”

– RNZ