Greytown county almanac

I have been asked on several occasions about black fantails in Greytown. Indeed one of my reporters was a bit afraid he might have been imbibing too much and was very much reassured when I said that yes, we do have some black fantails in Greytown. I have seen black fantails down Hawk Street, Wood Street, Mole Street and even near the park on Kuratawhiti Street, usually quite happily paired with a pied fantail. There are three plumage phases or morphs in fantails: the pied phase has a grey head, white eyebrow, brown back and yellow under parts. The chest is banded and the tail is mainly white. The juvenile phase is similar but has a browner body and indistinct body markings. The black phase is overall sooty black with a white spot behind the eye. The black fantail is not regarded as a sub species but is a genetic colour variation within the species, like black sheep. They breed freely with pied fantails. Black phase fantails are found mainly in the South Island and are quite rare in...

 I heard the old familiar piping of Kotare, the kingfisher, this morning. I do occasionally see a kingfisher, always solitary, usually along Wood Street, in Greytown, but nothing like the large numbers I used to see around Ohiwa Harbour in the eastern Bay of Plenty. There they would congregate during the winter, sitting on power lines, waiting for crabs to emerge from their holes in the mud flats at low tide. A concentration of kingfishers indeed! In the summer they would disperse up the river valleys to nest. I do wonder if they used to be more numerous around here when frogs and tadpoles were commonly found in ponds and cattle troughs around the farms or even in backyard ponds. Alas, the green bell frog is seldom seen these days, something no one seems to lament as they are an Australian import. However, some of our birds have suffered from their demise, notably the kingfisher, the herons and the bitterns. With the loss of the native fishery with the introduction of trout, the...

Why have house sparrows declined so dramatically, asks Bob Brockie (NZ Dompost, Monday, October 11, 2010) Sparrows cannot live by bread alone. Chicks need protein in order to mature and survive. Based on research conducted in the UK it has been shown that sparrow chicks are starving in their nests because their parents can not find enough insects to feed them. However is this likely to be true in NZ and in other parts of the world? And is it just sparrows that are in decline? The 2oth century biologist JBS Haldane said that “God has an inordinate fondness for beetles”. This is in reference to there being over 400,000 known species of beetles in the world, and that this represents 40% of all known insect species (at the time of the quote, it was over half of all known insect species). According to the UK's Invertebrate Conservation Trust, at least 250 of Britain's 4,000 plus species of beetle have not been seen since 1970. This is over and above the general decline in beetles...

The welcome swallow is something of a rare bird within Greytown itself but I have seen it in numbers out of town, up the top of Wood Street and along the Ruamahunga River. I've also seen a solitary bird along North Street and recently a couple this town end of Wood Street. I've often wondered why they do not appear to have taken up residence in the town itself because even in my back yard there are good warm places for them to nest and shelter and I would have thought anywhere where the fantail prevails, so too would the swallow. So I was greatly interested when one of my neighbours recently told me about of pair of birds which were regularly visiting his shed off the Main Street. They were indeed welcome swallows. Hopefully they will nest there this coming spring. The welcome, or house swallow, was self introduced from Australia in the 1950s so it is categorised as a fully protected native bird. Birds do keep coming across the Tasman from Australia. As well as Australasia, t...

Here it is November already and I have yet to hear the shining cuckoo in Greytown. The Birding News Group reported a shining cuckoo in the Rimutaka Forest Park on September 21 and a friend reported them at the top of Wood Street in late October, which is about when I would have expected them here, as it has been late October in other years that I have first heard them. The extremely cold October weather may have deterred their moving south. Talking to someone recently, they said they did not realise we had cuckoos here in New Zealand. Indeed, we have two, the shining and the long-tailed cuckoo, both migratory. The long-tailed cuckoo will only usually be seen outside the deep bush while it is in transit in the spring and autumn, when they very often are found dead after crashing into a window. (As I was writing this I had an email from soomeone living nearby in the Waiohine Gorge saying they had a long-tailed cuckoo crashed into the window!) But the shining cuckoo is everywhere...