New Zealand peak püteketeke

You’ve just been named New Zealand’s Bird of the Year!

Effective way ! After two weeks of intense campaigning, New Zealand’s bird of the year is the püteketeke: a waterfowl called here the Great Crested Grebe.

This strange bird has a habit of swallowing its own feathers before vomiting them – in short, making itself vomit – Their nuptial dance, for both male and female, consists of grabbing wet grasses and proudly presenting them over the water to him and his partner while they look at each other with their crops!

As for the competition, it has been organized every year since 2005 by Forest & Bird, a New Zealand nature conservation society that this year celebrates its centenary and has, on this occasion, renamed its annual competition “Bird of the Century”.

Who are the other candidates?

There was the tüï penguin, a passerine endemic to New Zealand whose song is wonderful, or the rockhopper penguin, a double-crested penguin, if you prefer. But none of these candidates had the striking power of püteketeke!

For a very simple reason: for about ten days, John Oliver, the British comedian and host of the popular US show Last Week Tonight, has taken up the püteketeke cause. He took advantage of the exclusivity in voting:

There was no need for it to be NNew Zealanders or even living in New Zealand to choose from. John Oliver wanted an “aggressive” campaign for his favorite bird and paid for billboard campaigns around the world.

He even dressed as a püteketeke live on TV. The result: While this contest usually attracts a few tens of thousands of voters, this time nearly 300,000 votes went to New Zealand’s Great Crested Grebe, the knockout winner.

How did New Zealanders react?

With humor of course… Some said they wanted to ‘silence’ John Oliver or ‘annoy’ this ‘sissy’! In short, the entire country was playing with words. Remembering that this competition wasn’t always so good!

And in 2018, the Australians – brothers of the New Zealanders’ eternal enemy – tried to overturn the result by voting en masse – and 300 of them fraudulently – in favor of the cormorants. A common bird in New Zealand and the island continent.

The following year, rumors of Russian interference had to be quashed, and two years ago, Butt was elected even though she was not one of the candidates. The bat is not a bird.. Rather, it is a flying mammal..

Finally, there is this statement from John Oliver that certainly sounds like a buffoon, but with a completely different message: after all, as he explained: “This is the essence of democracy: Americans meddling in foreign elections.”