Making Papier Mache Animals

 The wonderful papier mache tūī that accompanied me to the Imagine This! Festival at Porirua Library, was a huge hit with kids and parents. They were fascinated about how little it weighed and how life-like it looked. This lovely tūī was made by Meredith Thorpe, a Nelson-based artist. Parents and children asked me how to make a papier mache animal.

Meredith's Tūī

My Nature Journal - Best of 2018

Summer 2018

Tūī chick in my garden

One of the most memorable experiences last summer was getting up close to a tūī chick in the garden and watching the brood flourish. I wrote about it in my most popular blogposts: Tūī Takeover. Our tūī provide a source of both interest and entertainment all year round. And...

Autumn Nature Walk - a splendid kohekohe year

Kohekohe flowers

Cascades of blooms signal a splendid flowering year for the kohekohe. It's time to get out into our lowland coastal forests and enjoy the flowers and marvel at their abundance. They are already flowering now and should go on flowering through into June.

Tūī Takeover - tūī chicks growing up in the garden

I always enjoy spending the quiet of the Christmas - New Year break in Pukerua Bay. People leave the cities and suburbs for holiday spots, leaving us to enjoy a laid back week or so in our little suburban village. The bonus this year has been settled warm weather so I'm spending more time relaxing in our wild garden. On Christmas Eve while pottering around in the garden, I was startled by loud, insistent cheeping. Looking for the source, I found myself face to face with a tūī fledgling.

Tūī fledgling

The fledgling hopped around from plant to plant, making an occasional fluttering attempt, but as its wings weren't really developed it fluttered lower and lower until it was on the ground. I thought it wouldn't live through the night -  last year we lost two tūī chicks to neighbours' cats - but Cheepy (as she/he soon came to be called) was still there the next day and the next.

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

Counting Birds - New Zealand's 10 most common forest birds

I've been subjected to some friendly teasing from friends and family, who find it amusing that I just spent 2 days on a bird counting course. "How hard can it be?" they laugh, counting off 1 - 2 - 3 on their fingers.

 One tui in a kowhai tree

First Day of Spring - Tui and native flowers

The traditional first day of spring is cool, calm and sunny. We've had many winter days with settled weather, so it's been easy to get out and about. There have been signs of spring everywhere. The noisiest are the tui, usually solitary birds, they're gathering together, chasing, swooping and flying around the bay from tree to tree.

Five Tui silhouetted in a tree

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.

Tui Chicks in the Garden

In my last blog I wrote about birds' nests in the garden, saying that sometimes old nests get blown down in the wind. What I wasn't expecting was to find a new nest blown down. The tui nest got blown down in a storm.

The nest fell into a flax bush

Birds Nesting in the Garden

There are all sorts of signs that birds are nesting in our garden. A month or so ago, I saw sparrows flying around with bits of grass in their beaks looking for a good nest site. I don't know where they've nested. The blackbirds must have found somewhere to nest too, as I've already seen a youngster hopping around behind its parents begging for food. This is quite a sight, as the young blackbird is as big as its parents, but can't yet feed itself.

It's much harder to spot the nests. But if you look carefully, sometimes you can find them. Often a sign you're close to a nest is the alarmed noise from the parents, who might also fly away out of the tree. They do this because they think you are a possible predator and want to distract you from looking in the tree.

A tui nest in the garden

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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