Our cherry tree is now in full fruit, which makes it a pretty exciting place for the local blackbirds and thrushes. Usually we have lots of starlings and regular kererū too, but since we redid the roof last summer, we haven’t seen so many starlings about, and for some reason the big dumb kererū haven’t found the tree yet.
This morning was lovely and sunny, so I stationed myself quietly on the deck with the camera and waited.
Shortly there came a constant squeak, which turned out to be a very hungry baby thrush, looking very fluffy and with only half grown tail feathers:
Sure enough, up in the tree there was Mrs Thrush (though it is dodgy of me to name it so - both the male and female thrushes look the same so it could equally as well be “Mr Thrush”):
“She” flew down to the lawn, and presented the cherry to the chick:
(That’s a female blackbird flying out of shot there. At any one time this morning there were usually three or four thrushes and blackbirds working the lawn for worms and other insects.)
Lovely, just lovely. I could have watched for a lot longer… but I needed to cook lunch for my own.
Later, I swapped stories with my Mum down south; much the same story I’ve related here, plus our kārearea (Falcon) sightings over the house from a couple weeks ago. She trumped all that by telling me about the pair of Tomtits she’s seen in her garden, which is some thirty kilometres from the nearest decent sized patch of bush.
This is something of a mystery, which I hope to investigate a bit further when I’m down there at Christmas time. Could they be nesting nearby?
