Ruud Kleinpaste: Tauhou – The Numbers

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

A couple of weeks ago we talked about feeding birds in your garden. In view of a decent week off, Jack was training his birds to do without food – slowly getting them used to going and finding food elsewhere for the next week or so.

I realised that this requires some scientific back-up with observations from the distant past and very recent past, to see if the Tauhoa are really going to be affected by a week or so of no fodder.

About 18 years ago (I was living in Auckland – before I saw the light) my office was looking out over a trained citrus bush, right outside my window. From time to time flocks of silvereyes would visit in winter to look for scale insects and mealybugs, aphids and other delicacies.

I love this biological control and kept an eye on these birds – always been interested in birds, even more so later in life.

When the flocks kept on returning regularly, in spring I decided to take a look at what they were after and discovered a decent but unwanted population of scale insects that were causing quite a bit of pressure on my lemon (they also attract ants that feed on “honeydew” excreted by scale insects).

Luckily, a good flock of Tauhou descended and started working away at eating scales. Pictures show that this removed more than 50% of the sap-sucking plant pests.

Before helpers.

5 minutes after help arrived!

Not only were those little birds a great indicator of certain damaging garden pests, they were actually part of the Biological Control Squad.

In summer, they kept on coming back to the citrus to decimate the scale population.

In our current garden we feed the Tauhou with those meatballs from the Mad Butcher. I also make lard blocks, presented to them in small, metal cages.

Up to 40 birds at a time of census!!

So… I stopped feeding them for 5 days, just to see what would happen.

They were not impressed at all!! Kept on flying into their tree where the food parcels used to hang. Making lots of noise – “bad mood Bear”.

Other species were also returning to the food cart (sparrows, Green finches, Starlings and chaffinches).

It slowly tapered off to a dozen or fewer than that – but they always flew over the site for a check-up. And in the end a couple would sit in their food tree for a bit of preening.

I discovered that Silvereyes have a routine of visiting the local feeding stations in people’s garden. I reckon they have a circular trajectory from our place to Jan’s next door, 50 meters east, then across the road and another one (or two) west, and as far as 200 meters away, before returning to our side of the road via neighbours a few houses down (north-west);

I reckon they usually fly clock-wise.

When I hung up a fresh ball and timed the return, this morning, after 5 days of no food, it took 3 minutes before 19 Tauhou were gorging themselves – this grew to the usual congestion and fights 5 minutes later.

One other little experiment took place this year by banding a good number of silvereyes in our garden in autumn and winter: it was total of 81 individuals (73 newly banded and 8 “recaptures” – older birds).

In the past week I attempted to count feeding flocks of around 30 birds – the average number of banded silvereyes was around 2 and a half (2.5) of those 30.

I know… It’s pretty hard to count those fast-moving birds! And you never know if you’ve missed a banded individual when you quickly count the chaos before you.

If 1/12th of the birds you see are banded, (and you have 81 banded individuals in the population) you can guestimate that there must be 972 birds regularly in your garden flocks – give-or-take.

Almost a thousand of these little blighters passing through your garden on a regular basis… every day in winter!

And I reckon they’ll know exactly who’s got the food cart in the garden…

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