Chatham Island Tui

Chatham Island ("Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae chathamensis") The Kea is a cheeky bird on the South Island of New Zealand.

New Zealand Birds Online

From afar they look like blacks, but in good lighting they have a bright lustre of bluish, verdant and bronzed iridescence and striking clusters of whitish larynx (poi). As a rule, they are very voicelike, with a complex mixture of sonorous tones, riddled with coughing, grunting and wheezing. It has a deep red-brown back and sides with a bronzed lustre, the back and sides of the back have thread-like blank plumes, and there are two unusually wavy bunches of blank plumes at the cervix.

Teenagers initially have a brownish bodied and have no tufted larynx, but after a few month they are only affected by the missing indented 8. Voice: a noisy and complex mixture of sonorous tones, riddled with coughing, grunting and wheezing. Related species: Brales are uniform in colour, have no collar clumps and an amber beak.

Belbirds have very similar tune, but this is more fluent and lacks aloud cough, grunting and wheezing of tui. The Tui are common and plentiful in the North, South and Stewart Isles and their off-shore islets; they are rare only in dry, largely open areas eastward of the Southern Alps.

There is Tui on the Kermadec and Auckland Islands, and there is a bigger sub-species that is indigenous to the Chatham Islands. The Poor Knights Islands probably lack Tui because of the very high concentration of bell birds that compete for a finite source of bells. You can find Tui in indigenous woods and bushes (sometimes in tropical forests), in country backyards, in thriving kowal shark and gum populations, and in suburb parklands and garden.

If tui follows a sequence of blooming or fertile crops, there is much need for them. Usually they are nesting in indigenous forests and bushes, but they travel more than 10 km a day to eat from abundant wells. These are widespread in the Kermadec and Auckland Islands, but rare on the principal island of Chatham (more frequent in the south of Chatham).

In spite of the disappearance of the vast bulk of New Zealand's lowlands, tui has probably benefited from the advent of a wide array of blooming and fertile crops in New Zealand. Throughout the year, these new varieties, but also "out-of-range" plantations of indigenous varieties and sugar-water feeder in orchards, now reliably feed tui with nectars and fruits.

The recent efforts to re-introduce Tui on the Banks Peninsula and Chatham Island Tui on Chatham Island (from Rangatira Island) have been encouragingly successful. The Tui are very notorious for being aggressively defending a blooming or fertile plant or a small part of a large forest from all, whether it is another Tui or another type of avian.

The Tui are one of the most frequent flowering plant pollinators in New Zealand and also distribute the seed of mid-size fruit-tree. The Tui diets vary according to the seasonality of nectars and fruit. They prefer to eat nektar and honey dew, and they will often change to good source nectars such as uriri, kowai, fuchsia, rewa, flitch, ratas, pohutukawa, gum and banksia or swing around every day.

During the incubation period, they complement their food with large invertebrate animals such as the cicada and stock insect, which are obtained by falcons or by looking up from the outside of the plant. During the fall, medium-sized fruits such as grapes, kai komako, kahoe, ngaio, rimu or kaikatea make up a large part of the aliment. Blossoming gingiva, banksia, uriri and prunus are important springs of nektar in conservatories in winter, as well as sugar-water-feeder.

Colonization, husbandry and ecological state of Chatham Island tui (Prosthemadera naturaleiae chathamensis).