Hi all,
New to this forum. We have gradually built up a native garden at our west auckland property over the last 5 years and this has resulted in some exponential tui development over the last two years.
Last winter we got two birds (presumably a male and a female) feeding off pieces of fruit that we hung in the trees, but then as soon as the natural food supply came on tap they we're off.
This year we managed to persuade a single feldgling tui onto one of our nectar feeders (we assumed he was fledged from the parents that we had here previously) and after a few days his mum and dad came down as well and were feeding on the nectar feeders frequently throughout the day.
A few days later the adults bought with them another two young birds (only just fledged i'd say) and they would sit in our trees all day and wait for mum and dad to come and feed them from our nectar feeders - really cool to watch. eventually the youngsters figured it out themselves and they were soon feeding themselves and also getting pretty handy in the flying dept!
And then all of a sudden it just stopped, all 5 birds have not been seen or heard of the last 4 weeks or so.
Can anyone explain why? we think that all our local 'suburban' tuis have gone to the bush to feed of the masting tree species that are heavily fruiting at this time of year (Kahikatea, totora, rimu, miro, matai etc). we can vouch for this by going to the bush and sure enough you can hear them up in the canopy but i wanted to know if anyone else on here had experienced this before. I.e. tuis feeding heavily on nectar water and then all of a sudden going somewhere else for a month or two.
And of course this begs the question, will they come back on to our feeders on winter when all of their natural food sources drop off?
Any suggestions and comments are welcome