Big Pūkeko – Ōtorohanga

Corrugated iron is New Zealand's most honest building material – cheap, everywhere, rusting quietly on every farm shed in the country – and it turns out to make an excellent pūkeko.

The bird stands beside Huipūtea Reserve in Ōtorohanga. The pūkeko is one of the most familiar sights in rural New Zealand: a swamp hen with a deep blue-black body, bright red frontal shield and beak, and long red legs, usually seen picking its way along a wet paddock edge or crossing a road with visible reluctance. Rendering it in sheet iron plays on that ordinariness. This is not an exotic bird being celebrated; it is the one everybody sees and nobody photographs.