Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 45
Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds
For about a
fortnight now we have been expecting pukeko chicks to come out of the
blackberry. One of the signs has been the disappearance of about half the local
hapu (local extended family), which we assumed was on nesting duty in the blackberry; and we weren’t
wrong with the matriarch shepherding out a couple this morning.
 |
| Pukeko chick with matriarch |
These chicks are very young
and though we were on the path around 50 metres away, still they were quickly
whisked out of sight when we stopped to film them.
 |
| Pukeko chick 13 Oct 2014 |
The females pool
their eggs into one nest and share the nesting and then the upbringing although
there is a definite pecking order amongst them. There seems to be one matriarch
that dominates the group, with the younger birds often bringing back food for
her to distribute to the chicks.
Three years ago we watched the matriarch
showing a younger bird how to feed a chick – so a lot of this maternal behaviour is learned and not innate. Last year two nests emerged at the same time from
different ends of the lake and within a week they had also pooled their
resources and were bringing up the three chicks between them. Like
putangitangi, (paradise duck) they are very vigilant parents and all three
survived, though in the previous year, of a brood of four chicks only one
reached maturity. The other three weren’t set upon by predators but seemed to
fall to an illness. They could be seen sitting for long stretches, which is very
uncharacteristic. And then became coated in mud.
Neverthless this
bird is the most successful inhabitant at the dunelake and often raises a
second brood. Last year they produced another youngster, after the lake had
dried up. It was raised inside the blackberry and on a diet that must have
consisted mostly of blackberries. We think these birds like many
others on the lake, also have a nightlife, though this remains entirely unknown.
Song we were
listening to while posting this the Howard Morrison Quartet -My Old Man's an All Black. Early NZ folk protest song (against the sending of a team of All Blacks to South Africa from which Maori players had been excluded) Words by the inimitable Gerry Merito -
Fe Fi Fo Fum
(Hey Howard
Yeh)
There’s no Hori's in that scrum.
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