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The clearest sound in Mou Waho's forest isn't the wind or the lake — it's this small green bird's song.
Long before Mou Waho became a stop on lake tours, early European visitors to New Zealand were writing home about a bird they'd never heard the likes of. Captain James Cook famously described the bellbird's song as sounding like small bells, exquisitely tuned — and two and a half centuries later, walking the tracks on Mou Waho, it's easy to hear exactly what he meant.
Bellbirds, or korimako, are small honeyeaters — olive-green, with males carrying a faint purple sheen across the head and blackish wings, while females are a duller brown with a pale stripe running from the beak. You'll almost certainly hear one before you see one: their song carries a clear, ringing, bell-like quality, often performed as a duet between male and female, and it tends to peak at dawn and dusk. Every population has its own local dialect, so a Mou Waho bellbird doesn't sing quite like one from further up the valley.
Small bells, exquisitely tuned — and still the truest description going.
Bellbirds feed on nectar, fruit, and insects, using a specialised brush-tipped tongue to reach deep into native flowers — and in doing so, they pollinate many of the same plants they feed from. Mou Waho's predator-free status makes it exactly the kind of place where that relationship gets to play out undisturbed. Introduced predators — rats, stoats, possums — are the main reason bellbirds vanished from large parts of the mainland after European settlement, so an island where those threats have been removed is about as good as habitat gets.
Of the birds you'll come across walking up to Arethusa Pool, the bellbird is often the first one guests notice, simply because it's the loudest. If the forest suddenly sounds like a tiny orchestra of wind chimes, that's your cue to stop and look for movement in the canopy — patience usually pays off, since bellbirds sing solo throughout the day as well as in the dawn and dusk chorus.
Hear them for yourself on our full-day lake tour, which stops on Mou Waho.
