Silvereyes feeding |
Dear Friends,
One of the things that gives me a lot of pleasure is putting a mixture of honey and water out for native birds to feed on. I’ve made a “trough” out of a piece of bamboo and fixed it to the stem of a pohutukawa with black bungie cord. A mixture of three teaspoons of sugar and one of honey to 350 ml of water just fills the trough. More recently I’ve been using three teaspoons of a batch of marmalade that didn’t turn out quite right in the same quantity of water. Silver eyes, tui, and bellbirds love it.
Here a group of silver eyes queue up for a feed. There’s always a lot of wing trembling and jostling for space. I fill the trough daily (sometmes twice a day); it takes very little time before the birds arrive. We used to have a couple of cats but when they died we decided not to replace them. It seems that bird life around the garden has increased since then.
You can see the bamboo trough quite clearly in this photo. It seems to work very well.
Tui are quite aggressive and dominate the feeding station. I’ve seen as many as a dozen tui in the pohutukawa at a time; sometimes as many as three at the trough together.
But the biggest thrill over the last two years has been to have bell birds feeding and last week I saw six of them in a young kahikatea close to our back deck. They certainly are becoming more common in the district, a possible indication that local conservation efforts are being effective.
Best wishes
David Monro
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