In the late '80s a small item in the Evening Post told of the discovery of a South Island kōkako feather on Stewart Island. Ten-years-old, I wrote to the Wildlife Service asking if I ‘could please be kept up to date with future news’ of the thought-to-be-extinct bird with the orange cravat, Zorro mask and polished steel cloak.

We’d planned a good solid loop track. No retracing of footsteps. No having to reinvest in the landscape we’d already seen.

I was preparing to tramp around Mount Taranaki when I discovered the stinkhorn. One of the guides I read mentioned these strange things, brightly-coloured and foul-smelling fungus. They emit a rotten meat odour to attract flies that might then spread their spores. For me it was a surprise, a reminder that the bush held things I had never heard of, or even considered.

We might have said this before, but there’s beauty in knots. Like maths, they blend functionally and the abstract, and to connoisseurs they have a sort of music, with their patterns and seemingly endless possibilities.

Like so much fiction with dystopian elements, the novel I’m writing has bits of utopia in it. It’s via this route that kākā have found a place. Jenny Jones’ Kaka has helped bring the species close. This short book is shelved in the children’s section, and for a non-scientist it makes an appealing first look into the parrot’s gifts and quirks.

Of course, all those kākā recolonising Thorndon reminds me of our trip to Mt Bruce, and later visits to Zealandia itself. Here’s how a founder of Zealandia describes seeing for the first time the sanctuary’s future site:

From the Thorndon street where we’re living for some months, kākā can be seen or heard most days. When it rains they swoop through the pines and regrowth bush behind the house, and at night they circle the Botanic Gardens out the front. Their repertoire of calls come down, sometimes fluting and liquid, sometimes prehistoric squeers and squawks.

I waited for the coach to finish. He moved magnetic triangular boats around a whiteboard to indicate wind angles, sail trim and the variations of rudder movement. I glanced out to the water. The waves were short and steep, dumping themselves unceremoniously on the boat ramp. My red P Class, freshly rescued from a pile of leaves in my uncle’s backyard, sat on a trolley nearby.

I picked up a book from my friend’s coffee table. It was about building styles from around the world and I flicked through it, barely looking at the pages, while I waited for him to come back with our drinks. And then I saw it, a cabin of grey, notched logs sitting in a field somewhere remote. It was the start of what has been a five-year daydream, the possibility of a log cabin.

It was on an undergraduate ecology field trip in the Nelson Lakes National Park that I first encountered this curious little bird. I found myself assigned to a group of bird-lovers who were convinced we should spend our three days in the field studying the bird’s so called 'foot trembling'. I wasn’t so sure.