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Our cherry trees have blossomed a few weeks early this year bringing the tui in to feed. The tui typically start turning up a couple of weeks before the blossom opens, checking the trees out and staking out there territory. If the eastern rosella come in to feed on the buds then the tui will pretty quickly chase them off.  For the next two months our garden will be full of tui as the cherries all flower followed by the kowhai. We get 30 or 40 tui in the garden at a time chasing each other a …

Hihi gathering around the feeder taking their turn. Korimako pushes in then sits on a branch singing. The hihi scatter with flashes of yellow then return one by one sneaking in while the korimako concentrates on his song. In the distance tieke calling out notes rippling through the bush. A shadow overhead, a flight of kaka, cries echoing in the valley. Beauty manifesting herself in form, a movement, a song, a beat of wings the flight o …

I spotted this tui eating something in a dead tree in our shelter belt so zoomed in and took some photos though I couldn't quite make out at the time what it was catching. To my surprise, when I took the photos off the camera, I saw that it was catching wasps, what look like chinese paper wasps. Looking at the sequence of photos it caught and ate at least four wasps in the ten minutes or so that It took to take these photos. I knew that tui supplemented their diet with insects and have ofte …