Congratulations to all the feeding households for making it to 1 year! It has been a big learning curve for me, and a bit bumpy at times for all of us involved, but also very enjoyable watching the comings and goings of birds to the feeders over these past 12 months. So far, collectively, we have fed 1100 loaves of bread and 880 kg of seed to the birds of the North Shore. I hope they are grateful! Big thank you to EcoStock for supplying our bread and Tui Pet Products for the seed.
"Feeding pigeons in the Guildhall Yard" 1877 print
Last week I gave a talk to the North Shore branch of Forest & Bird about the study. The talk was well attended, and generated a lot of interest and positive feedback from the public. Bird feeding is obviously a topic that captures the attention of many of us. Just to give you a quick run down of what was covered in the talk if you missed it, I discussed the importance of human–wildlife interactions, the ubiquity of bird feeding and how it has developed from Victorian times into the practice we see today, the potential consequences of feeding – both positive and negative, how the New Zealand situation might be different than feeding in other parts of the world, the aims and methods of my study, a few preliminary results, and finally why the study is important. No doubt there will be other talks like this one in the future if you are interested in coming along to one, so I’ll post the details here.
We certainly have had plenty of birds bringing their young to the feeders over the breeding season. In particular many baby sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes, and starlings. It will be interesting to see whether bird counts and the feeder cameras reflect this. Currently the feeder cams are being rotated around the feeding stations. Plenty of great daytime visitation data coming in from these – plus some more data on night visitors. At one site we had 5 different cats snooping around on a single night. Plus the standard hedgehog or two, the odd possum, but still just 1 rat observed. Also had a rogue dog wandering about a property at 2am. |
I am gearing up to start another catching and disease sampling round in March, so it’s all systems go for the next little while.
Haere ra!
Josie
Haere ra!
Josie