Birds

The last morning I walked down to the bottom paddock to milk the cow before we brought them up here for grazing for a few weeks, I noticed a pair of Paradise ducks with a new brood of ducklings. They were swimming out of our small creek into the big one. A few days later, when the boys went down to play, Mr. Imagination soon came up to get his camera because they were back in the small creek. He got these pictures. Aren’t they cute!

Mr. Imagination, who is my nature-loving, scientific sort of child, spent a couple of weeks recently taking photos of all the birds he could see around here. This wood pigeon posed for him on top of the electric pole.

One morning he was very excited to see a baby plover in front of the house! I could hardly believe it, since it was a month earlier than they hatched last year, but he was right!

A couple of thrushes of some sort.

A blackbird on the neighbor’s rooftop.

One of the adult plovers.

The thrush again.

There’s the baby plover again!

And a picture of it with one of the parents. That baby was the star of the show that day! It was a bit difficult to keep attention focused on school books.

The flax bush just outside our windows is blooming this year, and we’re enjoying the tuis that come to drink the nectar! Sometimes, there are as many as three at once, and then there are fights over the blooms.

See the fluffed-up feathers? These tuis did not like the competition.

One afternoon, the little girls spent at least an hour, maybe two, playing together in the sandbox.

Another day, Mr. Imagination and Little Miss created hammocks for themselves from old feed bags and baling twine, after hearing about some children who did it in a story I was reading aloud.They enjoyed their hammocks for a couple of days, till the stitching at the bottom of the bag came apart.This  happened on still another day—Mr. Imagination gave Miss Joy a ride on a boogie board!

We have a very large New Zealand flax plant outside our window. We have been enjoying watching the birds and bees pollinating it since it started blooming.

First, the flower stalks grew buds.

Then, the flowers opened.

Sometimes, this tui comes to call.

There are always bees around.

We also see a lot of starlings getting a drink of nectar. They end up with an orange cap on their head! I haven’t gotten a good picture of that, so here’s the best we could do.

Here’s another starling.

A bellbird has been coming, too, but it’s shy enough that if it sees the camera it is gone. This is the best I could get of it.

We are really enjoying the birds as they enjoy the flax flowers!

In other words, flying flytraps! Since we leave the doors open for ventilation on warm days, and have no screens, we often have fantails in the house these days! They are such cheery little birds. They are so friendly they remind me of the chickadees we had in Michigan in the winter. They eat insects, though. As they swoop through the room, you can often hear a sharp little click as they catch another fly! That makes them welcome guests, you can imagine. I’ve been trying to get pictures of them in the house, but they move so fast it’s hard to catch them. That’s how I ended up with a picture of one taking off in flight. If you listen closely to the video of one, you can hear a faint twittering. It was a lot louder in real life, but apparently the sound capture isn’t real good on my camera. If you want to hear it better, go to this page, click on the sound icon, and choose “South Island fantail, male song.” Oh, and by the way, we’re studying birds, insects, bats and flying reptiles this year for science. We recently had a lesson about feathers, and one type of feathers is bristles. Bristles are found around the mouths of insect-eating birds. When we looked closely at the fantails in our house, we could see the bristles! They apparently help the bird to catch insects in flight. The bristles touch the insect and then the bird can turn to grab the insect.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHU1zrwUTPU]