Tūī
Tūī are some of the most common native birds in the Abel Tasman National Park. They are boisterous and usually very vocal with a distinctive broad sound of gurgles and clunks in addition to their finer song.
Tūī can look black from a distance, but they have an iridescent blue and green sheen and distinctive white throat tuft. Within New Zealand there are two subspecies of tūī with the female tūī being quite a bit smaller than the male.
They travel long distances to seasonally abundant foods and love fruit, nectar and invertebrates. They feed on the beech honeydew (or lerp to Australians), which is produced by a small scale insect probing into the phloem cells of beech trees. What the insect cannot consume is excreted onto the bark via a white waxy thread and is a welcome food.
Bird calls courtesy of NZ birds online
