Ruud Kleinpaste
Bugman Ruud Kleinpaste shares his lifelong passion for birds – and reveals how you can get involved.
How you can help track birds.
g ardening means different things to different people. We all know that, but until very recently I never ever thought about that at all. Yep, Julie likes planting flowers and hot colours, perennials and weird-coloured shrubs, and she always manages to create cool vistas and combinations.
I am more a vegetable- or fruitgrowing person, but then again, the Acer griseum in winter is something I will never pass by without having a look at the peeling bark, backlit with glorious low sunshine. Our native clematis is always a sure sign that spring is not that far away and the golden flowers of k¯owhai bring in the bellbirds and silvereyes.
I see and hear those birds as I weed the garlic patch. Even the goldfinches and redpolls get a squiz in spring, just to give me some colours on my retina.
Mind you, there are a few shrubs that I simply can’t be charmed by. Julie’s Cornus sanguinea ‘Midwinter Fire’ is one of those; it looks good in the pictures but most of the time it is either quite yellowy-bland, or hard work to prune so that the new shoots do their winter “show”.
Nevertheless, I acquired one as a present and duly planted it in the bottom of the garden, just down from the vegetable garden.
This food-producing patch is a work in progress. There are many soil types, ranging from nice, carbon-rich, well-draining and fertile to hideous clay that is lethal in wet weather.
Then there are the birds. They will peck at your cos lettuce (sparrows), peas (sparrows again), remove the woodchip mulch (blackbirds and thrushes) and eat your strawberries if they are not protected by a low net (blackbirds, thrushes, sparrows, silvereyes and probably dunnocks!). I don’t mind them destroying the flowers of the feijoas as that is a sure sign of violent pollination – the more the flowers are vandalised, the better the fruit will be in autumn. However, my berry fruit (raspberries, blueberries, boysenberries) will always be out-ofbounds. I am not willing to share them with any cute avian.
So I built myself a walk-in berry cage, quite large and clad in the strongest possible bird netting I could find and afford. It works well… until you get a small hole in the netting!
Last spring I noticed the raspberries not ripening well – heaps of promise in flowering and fabulous fruit-set, but the end result was extremely disappointing, with crop yields low, especially on the tops of the canes.
I initially blamed Canterbury’s horrific hail storm in spring, but it wasn’t.
A silvereye had found a tiny hole in the netting, almost at ground level and this little so-and-so carried out regular sorties in my berry cage, picking everything that was just right and just ripe.
I grabbed my butterfly net and set out to capture the offender – as you do – by sweeping at it as it flew past inside the cage.
No problem! Third sweep and it was in the bottom of the net.
When I held the bird in my hand, I could feel its heart racing and its tiny claws struggling to get out of my grip. I also saw the beautiful green feathers and rusty-brown flanks, sharp bill (handy to pick up scale insects) and that distinctive silverywhite ring around the eyes.
I commented to Julie that it was also missing feathers on the top
I saw the beautiful green feathers and rusty-brown flanks, sharp bill (handy to pick up scale insects) and that distinctive silvery-white ring around the eyes.
of its bill, probably because it had been trying to push its way into my berry cage by sticking its head into a small opening in the mesh.
I’ve often admired these birds for their pest control in my garden. In fact, I encourage them in winter to visit my place by providing lard blocks and other goodies ( NZ Gardener, May 2017). So, to be honest, I wasn’t too cross with this bird – I should have been more diligent about checking the integrity of my netting.
I fixed that netting immediately and took the little berry raider to Julie, who was working elsewhere in the garden, to show her my surprise catch. As I was about to release it, I noticed that the silvereye had a small metal band around its right leg.
This bird was banded! It had its own registration number (A 129527) in tiny engraved letters and cyphers, and that brought back a heap of extremely exciting memories.
I have been interested in birds from an early age. It was my number one hobby from when I was seven years old, when I got a pair of binoculars for my birthday. As a student in the Netherlands, I climbed to the tops of huge trees to grab young herons in their nest and mist-netted songbirds, all to band them (mist nets are large nets with very fine mesh, used by ornithologists to capture wild birds).
But imagine how cool such a tagging project can be; you find out so many things about longevity, movement, migration, development of plumage…
In Spain, I assisted ornithologists with banding eagles and flamingos, and when I migrated to New Zealand in the late 1970s, it only took two years before I started a banding study of our endemic North Island brown kiwi, in Waitangi Forest, Northland.
Yep… I might as well come clean, right now: the Bugman is really a birdman first and foremost.
This little silvereye started a whole new (old?) journey for me. I worked out, via the DOC banding office, who put the band around my little friend’s leg, where it had been banded initially and on what date. As it turns out, it was captured last winter
in a neighbour’s garden by Peter, an experienced bander, no more than 30m from our berry cage.
But imagine how cool such a tagging project can be; you find out so many things about longevity, movement, migration, development of plumage, moulting, difference between sexes, weight loss during hard times, habitat preferences and breeding biology.
A banded bird is a little bit like a car with a number plate or a plane with a registration number, but more in a biological sense.
The Banding Office has published the most wonderful stories of bird bands and their journeys, such as the band on a paradise duck from Diamond Lake in Otago that ended up in the back of a couch in Wynne, Arkansas in the US. Or the legband of a gannet retrieved from the stomach of a tiger shark, which may not seem to be too unexpected, but how else would you collect that kind of observation?
There are data about incredible journeys of migration, vast distances over oceans and mountains.
To make a long story short, this whole bird banding gig was too cool to ignore, so I signed up for a banding permit, Level 1 (the lowest of the beginners). This means I can go along with an expert (which happens to be the same Peter who banded the silvereye that started it all off) and learn the intricacies of banding.
It also connects me with feather moult and development and identifying the age and sex of all those species that fly into the mist nets.
Of course, we have much bigger plans than just handling birds and giving them their own jewellery; imagine taking this to the class rooms of primary schools around the Halswell Quarry! Getting the kids to be involved in marking these birds and observing their life story could become a whole new facet of curricular activities at school.
This, Peter and I believe, will be the new “normal” of environmental education, out there in the natural world, and we’re going to have a shot at that, linking it all to trapping rats, possums, stoats and hedgehogs, to give our native birds a chance to thrive.
But in the meantime, we locate nests of goldfinches, dunnocks, kingfishers and swallows, and put shiny bands around the babies’ legs and have a lot of fun doing it.
But the story of the berry cage raider continued a few weeks after the first episode: Another silvereye gained entry to my inner sanctum. I checked the repaired hole and found that my workmanship was clearly not as good as I thought.
Out came the butterfly net and, swoosh-swoosh, the offender was quickly caught. I bet you are able to guess the identity of the offender!
A 129527 showed serious signs of being a recidivist delinquent, with a good memory and a knack for spatial problem-solving.
After release, this bird flew a short distance into the gum tree on the edge of our section and sat there, totally at ease. There was something quite unusual about this feathered fruit eater; I could not put my finger on it until a few days later, when I discovered a nest with three baby silvereyes, in an ornamental shrub no more than 7m away from my berry cage. Peter and I banded these babies.
A day or so after banding, I spotted one of the young silvereyes’ parents as it was approaching the nest to feed its little ones. Through binoculars I could see that this adult also had a shiny band around its right leg…
You guessed it! A 129527, right leg and missing feathers on top of the bill.
It all made perfect sense. My winter feeding had attracted quite a few silvereyes to our garden, as I expected it would do, but here is simply another example of how banding birds can supply evidence of their movement and behaviour. I’ll be looking out for A 129527 this coming winter on the lard blocks! (I’ll also be looking out for the little punks that descended from that parent.)
Ah yes. I nearly forgot to tell you that the ornamental shrub this bird selected to build its nest in was Julie’s prized Cornus sanguinea. I’ll probably never hear the end of that! ✤