An unsettling quiet

Standing on the bow of the Fiordland Navigator in one of the side channels of Doubtful Sound, the water was as smooth as glass. All motors had been turned off. As I stared at the glacier-carved rock covered with a thin layer of life clinging to the shallow soil, I was struck by the silence.

View from the deck at our quiet place
(taken after our quiet time, when cameras were back in action)

In part I was impressed that the entire boat load of 80 some souls stood motionless, no cameras clicking, no fidgeting, a collective moment of stillness to appreciate the grandeur around us. But the silence was also striking for what it implied.

The trip my friends and I were on had begun the afternoon before. It was blessed with sun, which is not the norm for an area that measures rain in feet, not inches. That first afternoon we motored our way out to the open ocean to visit a seal colony on the rocks. On the way back, there were kayak explorations along the edges of the fiord, with a larger tender boat for those of us not up to kayaking.

A string of kayakers exploring the fiord

Throughout the trip we were lavished with food, and a fantastic naturalist sharing tidbits on local natural history and geology. On the morning of our second day we had dolphins visit us, before we pulled into that narrow arm of the fiord for our moment of stillness.

View from the bow heading up the fiord

The captain had told us we were in for a treat; that he needed our help to make that moment special. Aside from the fidgeting of a few kids, we all complied, sitting, listening, and appreciating the stillness. The quiet brought a mixture of feelings.

I was in total bliss at being in such a remote and wonderful place; at sharing that quiet moment with friends who had traveled around the world to spend their holidays with me. The place just feels old. It is about as unpopulated by humans as any place in the country. We were tucked away inside the World Heritage Area of Fiordland National Park, which covers 10% of New Zealand’s land mass. These forests have been growing here (and falling down and growing back again) since the time of the super continent of Gondwana, millions of years ago. To be there surrounded by the stillness of the emerald hills, I felt like it could have been anywhen.

Sunrise on a timeless landscape

Yet it also brought sadness. The quiet we were hearing felt almost unnatural, wrong. There should have been countless birds singing their odes to summer, courting new mates, shattering the very silence we were trying to appreciate.

The quiet was reinforcing a feeling I’d had throughout the trip. As full of life as the waters had been, the forest somehow felt empty to me. In part, this was because I know there are no native mammals out there (except for a few bat species), and to me knowing those endless forests had no mammals just made them feel incomplete. But that isn’t the whole story, for today there are mammals out there, all introduced, all wreaking havoc on the native bird populations. It is because of their presence that the bird life here has suffered tremendously, and that was what made the silence so palpable, so painful, that morning.

There are efforts to turn this around. I was reminded of this when I came across a publication on the shelves of the library in my office at DOC titled Restoring the Dawn Chorus. It was a serial title, repeated every few years, with updates on collective efforts to do as the title implies. There are countless non-profits harnessing volunteer energy to do the same thing – control introduced predators, restore habitat and raise and release endangered species. All are important and all are making a difference. These positive efforts are what I hold on to, what make me smile, what renew my faith in our future on this planet.

Yet when I think back on that moment of stillness in the side channel of Doubtful Sound, what I most recall is the bittersweet feeling for what was missing in the unsettling quiet.