It’s that time of year where I complain about the Austral winter, which arrived suddenly yesterday and has been inflicting gales, thunderstorms and tornadoes on New Zealand. To celebrate I’m off to Melbourne on Friday, were the weather promises to be more pleasant, for a long weekend. While the purpose of the trip is mostly to see family and friends and perhaps mark the occasion of another mostly successful passage around the sun, I will be getting a few hours of birding in here and there. One of my targets is my lifer Red-capped Robin, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to show off some shots I recently got of a New Zealand species of the same family, the South Island Robin. (Incidentally, I feel I should win some kind of award for the most tangential introduction to a post I have ever written on this site. It was all over the place!)
A South Island Robin (Petroica australis) sporting some scientific bling.
Anyway, the South Island Robin is a member of the Petroicidae, an Australasian family that isn’t remotely related to the American Robin or the European one, but is named for their similarity in shape to the latter. The South Island Robin was once lumped with the North Island Robin as the New Zealand Robin, but differences in plumage mean most but not all authorities split the two species.
I photographed these at a birdbath, but the species is very confiding everywhere.
A different individual. These birds had been translocated, hence the banding.
Boing!
Inspecting potential food
Tastes like food
All gone! Was food!
During a night partying in Christchurch, I was telling people about my upcoming hiking trip to Stewart Island and that I was a birder. I was amazed how many “ordinary” (aka non-birding) people knew quite a bit about the country’s bird life, and someone gave me the advice that once I had crossed a marsh coming from Mason Bay and entered a forest, I should start clapping my hands and South Island Robins would appear. A few days later, I landed at Mason Bay, crossed the marsh, entered a forest, sat down, clapped my hands and a South Island Robin landed on the tip of my hiking boot.
*Birding Magic*
I later learned that these robins had been conditioned with food to respond to clapping in order to work with them more easily during a scientific project. Okay, not birding magic after all, but still a very magical moment.
Thanks, Duncan, for bringing back these amazing memories!