Bellbird
The forest’s ringing voice
Listen
Imagine a bush gully just before sunrise. The air is cool and still, and the light is only beginning to find its way through the canopy. Then, from somewhere high in the trees, comes a single clear note, round and bright as a struck bell. Another answers it, then another, until the whole gully is ringing.
Closer by, a small bird slips into a flowering tree with a soft whirr of wings. It works quickly from bloom to bloom, dipping its curved bill deep into each one, pausing just long enough to sing a few liquid notes before moving on. Pollen dusts its forehead. Somewhere below, a seed it carried last autumn is quietly becoming a tree.
By the time the sun is fully up, the chorus has thinned to a few scattered songs. But for those few minutes, the forest sounded like music.
Meet the korimako
The bellbird, or korimako, is a honeyeater found only in New Zealand. It is a medium-sized songbird about 20 centimetres long. In life, bellbirds are olive green, with wine-red eyes and a short, curved bill. Males have a purple-tinted head and darker wings and tail, while females are browner, with a narrow pale stripe across the cheek.
Its secret is its tongue. A bellbird has a brush-like tongue that it uses to reach deep inside flowers for nectar. As it feeds, it carries pollen from flower to flower, helping pollinate many native trees and shrubs. Later, when those flowers have become fruit, bellbirds eat the fruit too and spread the seeds. In this quiet way they help the forest renew itself twice over. They also take insects and spiders gleaned from leaves and bark, and in beech forest they sip the sweet honeydew produced by scale insects on the trunks.
Bellbirds live in native and regenerating forest, scrub and shelter belts, and they visit parks and gardens where there’s enough cover and food. They can be found from close to the coast up to about 1200 metres.
A song that changes from place to place
Most New Zealanders know the bellbird by its song: clear, ringing notes without the clicks, grunts and wheezes that often mark the call of its cousin, the tūī. But bellbird songs vary enormously from one place to another. One study in Christchurch found that birds in three separate patches of bush on the Port Hills each had their own distinct song.
The famous bell-like effect is at its best when many bellbirds sing together, mostly at dawn and dusk, in places where they are plentiful. Male bellbirds have another sound too: notches in their outer wing feathers make a distinctive whirr in flight, which they turn up during territorial disputes.
A comeback in progress
Bellbirds were once common throughout the North and South Islands. Their numbers fell sharply from the 1860s in the North Island and the 1880s in the South Island, around the time ship rats and stoats arrived. For a while it seemed they might vanish from the mainland altogether.
They have since recovered in many areas and are classed as Not Threatened, though they remain scarce in some regions, including much of the mainland north of Hamilton. Where predators are controlled, they are returning. In 2010, bellbirds were rediscovered on Motutapu Island after an absence of more than a century, following a major pest eradication programme there.
Why we love it
There’s something deeply hopeful about the bellbird. It is a small bird doing enormous work: pollinating, planting and singing the forest back to life, one flower and one seed at a time. Its song is different in every valley, as if each patch of bush has its own voice. Once you’ve heard a dawn chorus of bellbirds, you don’t forget it.
The artwork: a moment of stillness
Here, the bellbird is caught in a rare moment of rest. It sits facing right on a slender branch that rises diagonally from the lower left, its body plump and rounded, its head lifted. Its eye is ringed and bright, and its slender, gently curved bill points out into open space, as if it has just heard something worth listening to.
The detail rewards a close look. Fine, parallel lines describe the long wing feathers, layered one over another, while softer shading models the round breast and the curve of the back. The feet grip the branch with real weight.
The plant detail is deliberately sparse. A feathery spray of leaves rises at the lower left. At the lower right, slim buds and a delicate flower spike with fine filaments reach upward. Behind the bird, fern fronds fade softly into the background, along with gentle blurred shapes that suggest leaves and dappled light. That restraint keeps every eye on the bird, while still placing it firmly in its forest world.
The engraving works entirely in warm tones rather than the bird’s living greens. On this warm, honey-toned surface with rounded corners, the darker browns of the bird and branch stand out against the paler background, giving the whole piece the soft glow of an early-morning scene.