Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae

*This was taken before my camera realized it was in New Zealand, which is a day ahead of California, and I cannot modify the date from my iPad, so just for the record, this picture was taken on Thursday, 22 November!!*

Look what I found! It's an endemic New Zealand honeyeater, the Tui--and I haven't even been here 3 hours! I think this is a good start to my trip.

The flight was hell in a giant metal tube. It was 13 hours overnight and I slept about 45 minutes. I'm strung out to the max. I arrived at my hostel in the Mt. Eden area of Auckland at 7 am, very much way too early to check in. Happily they let me stash my bag in the office while I wandered up Mt. Eden, a small inactive volcano that stands as the highest natural point in the Auckland area. The 360 view up there is amazing, and the slopes are bursting with bird song. Most of those songs belong to introduced species of European finches and sparrows, but the highly varied melodic, crackly, wheezy ones belong to the prolific Tui.

This species of honeyeater is unique among its kind in maintaining a widespread range across the main islands of New Zealand. The populations of most other endemic passerines have been decimated by invasive species, habitat loss, and introduced predators, and now exist in precariously low numbers, primarily on heavily protected offshore islands that have been eradicated of nonnative predators and revegetated with native flora. I'm kicking off my trip by spending a week on one of these islands in the Hauraki Gulf (which is adjacent to Auckland), called Tiritiri Matangi Island. There I'm hoping to find many of the species I no longer have any chance of seeing on the mainland.

The Tui is a beautiful, fascinating bird. I've never observed anything like it. Its flight is unusually acrobatic and erratic for a large passerine, dipping and diving and changing course midair, as if a hummingbird. Its wingbeats are strangely audible. And the song is all over the place--sweet, piercing, clicking, raspy, mewing, mimicking. I've found several references in the literature that claim the native Maori trained Tui to speak human words.

Given that I've already come across 10 or so of them today, I imagine I'll be seeing them a lot. Which is great.