Overview
Scientific name: Puffinus griseus
Common names: tītī, muttonbird
Shearwaters are a member of the petrel family. Of the five known species in New Zealand waters, the sooty shearwater (P. griseus) is the most common, and during the breeding season it is the most numerous sea bird in southern New Zealand waters. Its worldwide population is estimated at sixty million but recent evidence indicates that this population is declining.
This bird is a circumpolar species, found in oceans throughout the world. However, its only known breeding areas are in the Southern Hemisphere. A thousand years ago, numbers would have been very high on New Zealand’s offshore islands and mainland headlands during the breeding season, from November to April. The main breeding areas at this time were islands such as the Snares, Campbell, Auckland, and Macquarie Islands. Large breeding colonies also existed on the mainland.
Historically, Māori harvested them, the remains of tītī being found in sites associated with Māori settlement. Iwi (tribes) from Te Waipounamu (the South Island) developed ingenious methods for preserving and storing birds, and preserved birds were traded. Feathers and down were incorporated into clothing.
The customary harvest of tītī is today a large-scale commercial enterprise for Māori from Rakiura (Stewart Island) who have the sole right to take the birds. These rights to harvest cover thirty-six islands around Stewart Island, jointly known as the Tītī Islands.
The largest known colony is on the Snares Islands, about 100 kilometres south of Stewart Island. During the breeding season, the island is occupied by about two million breeding pairs.
Harvesting tītī, known as muttonbirding, takes place from 1 April to 31 May each year. The season is divided into two parts – nanao (reach down) and rama (by torchlight).
During nanao, from 1 April to about 22 April, harvesters gather birds by daylight. Usually this is done by reaching down into the nest burrows, which can be over a metre deep, taking hold of the single chick there and carefully manoeuvring it out. It is then killed and the stomach contents removed by squeezing the abdomen.
Rama is the harvest by night, from mid-April to late May. At this time, chicks and fledglings leave the burrows when it’s dark to exercise their wings, and muttonbirders hunt them with torches.
Once birds have been caught and killed, they are plucked and hung for a time. They are then split, gutted, salted and put into large plastic pails. Preserved in this manner, they can keep for a year or more.
The traditional method for storing tītī is in pōhā, or bags made from bull kelp fronds. A frond is split, inflated, then filled with tītī and tītī fat to preserve the birds. Tōtara bark strips are wrapped around the pōhā and then it’s placed in a flax basket.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (2006)