This past season’s avian (bird) activity

The avian focus area is inside the
red boundary line. 

There are three stages of getting a bird species (e.g. tui) re-established into an area.

1/ the bird is seen outside the breeding season.

2/ they are present during the breeding season and they develop a territory and nest.

3/ Chicks survive to fledge

It is not until stage 3 that a species can truly be classified as re-established. For most indigenous species this will require the removal of rats, possums and mustelids*.

Prior to our aggressive rat and possum eradication policy (there has been no signs of mustelids) in Mangaiti Gully which started in 2016 it was rare to see any juvenile birds outside the occasional fantail.

* ferrets, stoats & weasels

Tui

Photo by Owen Cole

The Halo project must be credited with getting tui back into Hamilton City in large enough numbers to re-establish. It is hoped that kereru / woodpigeon and bellbirds will also follow.  In Mangaiti Gully since 2016 there has been a year on year increase to the point that sightings of juvenile tui during the  breeding season are now a common sight and tui are now moving out of the gully into the suburbs. We recorded a tui nest this season. A grandson of one of our volunteers edited the recordings into a You Tube clip

Owl nest

When the arborist was installing a bat home in a large old pine, he found a morepork / ruru nesting in a hollow in the trunk. Using a motion activated field camera we filmed the morepork’s nesting activity. There was at least one chick being feed. Open the attached 10 sec video clip to see the owl approaching the nest and feeding a chick.  Filmed on the 21st December.

 A further owl observation was made not all that far from the nest this month (April) by a family getting “nature time” during the lock down. They found a morepork perched in a tree down in the gully.  They had a special time looking at it and it looking at them.  They were only 1 metre away from it! 

White-faced heron nesting

A white-faced heron chick. A difficult photo shot because of the
height above the ground and many branches. Photo by Owen Cole

In the old pines just west of Sexton Road and tucked in behind Rototuna Primary School a pair of white-faced herons have been nesting for the last few years. This year we took more interest in recording and observing them. They raised one chick to fledge. Other years they have had two. Old mature pine trees are an ideal nesting tree for them with lots of horizonal branches which to build their very unstructured nest of sticks. The height above the ground made observing and photographing difficult. This same height gives them a certain amount of protection from rats and possums (no pest control here) particularly in pine trees which have no appeal to either of the pests as a tree food source, but there are other threats. There was an observation in another area of a harrier hawk attacking and eating the contents of a white-faced heron nest. There was much commotion by the parents but to no avail. 

Kingfisher

Photo by Rex Bushell

While observing the tui nest, two kingfishers were high up on the dead willow branch. One, a parent, and the other a fledging following the parent and being feed cicadas. According to the bird photographer and observer G.J.H.Moon, the Kingfisher population took a dive with the introduction of the myna. The myna usually robs the Kingfishers nest after the four to five eggs hatch and the parents are away leaving the chicks unattended.

If there are normally four to five eggs, one wonders what happened to the other chicks? The photo is of another not quite fully airborne fledging, taken some days later in the same vicinity.  No sign of mum or dad though. 

Brown Quail

Brown quail. Photo by Peter Reese (Not in Mangaiti)

A brown quail was sighted around the pond on Tuesday 10th March with another two sightings over the next few weeks. These interesting little birds were introduced from Australia so they cannot be classified as native. They are common in Northland and classified as moderately common in the Waikato. They are not strong fliers and tend to have a rapid short flight when disturbed as this one did.

It would be good to have them establish themselves in the gully. They are ground nesters laying 7 – 12 eggs. Even if the rats and possums where taken out, the quail would still be vulnerable to hedgehog and domestic cat predation.