Former RNZ broadcaster who started bird call tradition dies aged 82

36 minutes ago

Robert Taylor started playing bird noises on his all night programme for his 'night owl' listeners.

Photo: Supplied

Former RNZ broadcaster Robert Taylor, who helped start the tradition of morning bird calls on the public broadcaster, has died aged 82.

He has been remembered as a kind and gentle man with a passion for broadcasting, and a love for nature and conservation.

The first ever morning bird call was played on the National programme, as it was called back then, on Waitangi Day in 1974.

The tradition has been going strong for more than 50 years now. But it turns out, it did not start with a bird at all.

When Taylor started at the NZBC - the predecessor of RNZ - in the early 1970s, he worked on the all night programme, and wanted the sound of a ruru or morepork to play to his 'night owl' listeners.

But he did not have an actual recording of the bird, so he recorded his sound engineer mimicing it instead.

The phony morepork call played on the air for a couple of months, until NZ Wildlife Service staff member John Kendrick got in touch.

"He said to me 'what's that strange morepork call you're broadcasting?'... so I had to fess up and tell him that it was a fake that we had done because we couldn't get hold of the real thing."

After that, Kendrick provided the bird calls from his own library of recordings, and when Taylor moved to the Morning programme the next year, he brought the bird calls with him.

Former RNZ broadcaster Robert Taylor.

Photo: Supplied

Taylor's daughter Lydia DiCaprio remembered her father as a gentle man who loved nature, and spent plenty of time outdoors with her and her brother Rob growing up.

One of the things her father was proudest of was campaigning to save the Chatham Islands Black Robin, DiCaprio said.

The robin was once down to just one breeding pair - named Old Blue and Old Yellow - but now had a population in the hundreds.

"He was really proud of that. He had a picture of Old Blue on the wall. That was a point of pride for him for sure."

The long-standing bird calls were a lovely legacy of her father's life, she said.

"I think the bird calls when he introduced them New Zealand birds weren't as much a part of our national identity as I think they are now... I think in some way he played a little part in us recovering our birds."

Taylor was also a keen poet, and American Civil War enthusiast.

He had been living in retirement in Whanganui up until his death.

There were now hundreds of bird calls in the RNZ library which played every weekday before the 7am and 9am news - more than 50 years after Robert Taylor first helped bring them to the radiowaves.

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