What Bird is That? identifying native forest birds

Forest Birds ID card from "In the Bush" - now free to download

Interested in New Zealand's native birds and want to be able to identify them? Ten or so years ago I'd be out in the forest not sure what I was hearing or seeing. Here's some of the steps that I took to improving my knowledge of New Zealand birds.

Set yourself a bird-watching challenge: for example, take part in the New Zealand Garden Bird Survey on this week from 24 June to 2 July.  Gardens are a good place to start because often birds are easier to see in a garden and you can learn bird-watching techniques (see tips below) that will help you when you are out in the forest, beach or wetland. The Top 10 birds in gardens in 2016 were:

Garden Bird Survey and Volunteer Week - Citizen Science at its best

Days, Weeks or Months that highlight different causes or ideas pander to our short attention spans, but if we only volunteer in volunteer week, not much would get done around the country! I'd like to think Volunteer Week gets people started, selecting a cause to volunteer with. There are so many deserving causes, there really is something for everyone, whether it is helping make breakfasts in schools , delivery library books to the housebound, patrolling a dangerous beach as a lifeguard or building rat traps.

Rat traps for gardens and parks in Paekakariki 

Who's In the Garden? my Garden Bird Survey

For a number of years now I've been counting birds as part of the annual Garden Bird Survey. To start with it seemed a bit artificial only counting the birds seen in one hour. But knowing that many birds are visiting, moving from one garden to another, it's a fair approach. What began as a simple survey led me to was to spend more time looking at who was in my garden and when.

Fantails weren't here at survey time this year

My Bird Count

warm up
get ready
look out the window
one yellow hammer
in a flock of sparrows too many to count

step out
in the garden
two seagulls high in the sky
shadows of starlings and silver-eyes flying through
two resident blackbirds rustling under trees
one fantail flitting
one chaffinch perching
one tui coughing and chuckling
count me, count me

Be a Citizen Scientist - join the garden bird project

Hooray it's the start of the Garden Bird Survey today. Between now and 6 July, spend an hour in your garden counting birds, you might be surprised by what you see. By doing the survey, I discovered that in the winter grey warblers and fantails visit our garden in winter but not in summer. 

Blackbird or Tui - which bird is it?

Last week I was invited to read In the Garden to the lovely, lively children at Sand Dunes early childhood centre. I listened very carefully to their comments and was pleased to see the slugs and spiders in our garden have as many fans as do the pretty and more obvious butterflies. What most interested me was that the children were confused between the tui and the blackbird, at least in the first reading of the book.

The cover shows a tui and it appears on other pages too.

Garden Bird Survey

I missed this year's Garden Bird Survey because I was overseas. But am interested to see the results. You can check these out on the Landcare website. The graph shows just how dominant sparrows are along with silvereyes. Last year doing the survey made me pay more attention to the birds in the garden and I realized that we are visited by grey warblers in the winter. Not many people reporting warblers, I guess they like the native trees in our garden.
The survey made me realize too, just how different the garden is between summer and winter. In summer there is a chance we'd see kereru, but by winter they have all disappeared. Tui and fantails stick around. In winter the silvereyes come in flocks, whereas in summer there are just a few around.

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