Tauhou, the Silver-eye
A bird has flown into our house and it won’t fly out again. I’m pretty sure it is a Tauhou (Silvereye).
A small olive-green forest bird with white rings around the eyes. They have a fine tapered bill and a brush tipped tongue like the Tui and Korimako, the bellbird, for drinking nectar. It is now one of the most abundant of New Zealand birds and will be found everywhere excepting open grassland habitats. The flocking call, often heard in flight, is an excited chirping, while single birds often give a plaintive ‘cree’ call.
It sure is ‘creeing’ a lot as it clings to our light fitting. We can’t seem to get it out any openings. It’s very tiny and beautiful though! Hopefully it will leave soon, poor thing. I can’t remember a single bird getting into our house in Sydney, but we get tons here - some accidentally like Tauhou, and other larger ones for the scraps of food left about by children!
Update: I walked out of my office immediately after writing this post, and it flew out the back door - just like that. Yay.
Apologies for the nasty comment spam this morning. Yuck! I am working on installing a plugin that requires you to enter a visual code thingy in order to post a comment. Hopefully this will protect us from spam-bots. Apologies to any visually impaired users that may want to comment but I am desperate. Who would have thought my humble blog would require bank-like security? Sigh.
