City songbirds

Blogger: Forest & Bird’s Web Manager, Mandy Herrick

It’s hard to think that Auckland was a forested expanse home to North island brown kiwi, kokako and flocks of kakariki, given that these avian citizens are no-where to be seen.

So far, we’ve done a pretty good job of shunting any wildlife from the city by laying down large areas of concrete, noodling the city with motorways, unleashing a host of pests and filling our parks with grass and exotic trees.

Generally. we’ve just failing our avian citizens on all fronts by providing them with few nesting sites, very little food and polluted airways.

Forest & Bird is hoping to reverse this trend by bringing birds back into the city by creating safe green corridors and then re-homing these long-lost avian refugees back into forested verges near the city: namely Ark in the Park.

Last week, we released 50 whitehead into 2,000 hectares of pest-controled forestland in the Waitakere ranges.

Diminiutive, sweet and perhaps somewhat dim-witted, the whitehead is one of those tireless surrogate mothers that feed and nurture long-tailed cuckoos – even after they’ve evicted their brood from the nest.

The good news is that long-tailed cuckoos are threatened, so if you introduce whitehead into a forest, chances are the population of long-tailed cuckoos will bounce back too!