Birders unite -

When sorting through diaries, notebooks, audio cassettes, photographs and sketches from one of NZ’s saltiest adventurers and original citizen scientists – Gerry Clark – NZ Maritime Museum’s Collections Specialist Nicholas Keenleyside was struck silent when he found something from his own hand.

Forty years earlier he had dashed off a few bird drawings as a teenager at the behest of his friends who wanted a few gift cards for visiting tourists to the Falkland Islands. Born and raised on this avian archipelago, Keenleyside’s drawing of a night heron caught the attention of one of Gerry’s friends who sent it to his bird-loving friend for Christmas in 1994.

Six years earlier, Clark had finished a three-and-a-half year expedition around the Southern Ocean on a 10-metre yacht that he built to study, count and document the birdlife around the Southern Ocean. He braved the rugged coasts of Cape Horn, the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, the Sub-Antarctic islands and the Magellan Strait. During his travels his boat was dismasted twice and rolled five times, though Clark lived to tell the tale through his book The Totorore Voyage. “He was one of the original citizen scientists, who set off in a very small boat to document life on the oceans on the smell of an oily rag. Those people who knew him said he was an unassuming person, though he stood out for his ability to just beat his own path and get out there.” The piece featured in the exhibition, Captain, Collectors, Friends and Adventurers, which includes some of the records from Gerry’s major expeditions.