New Zealand Pigeon/Kereru

Description:

A beautiful pigeon with irridescent green/pink head, distinctive red/orange beak and white under belly, and purple/blue irridescent wings and upper tail feathers. It is a large bird, which can weigh over 600g and is about 50cm long. It is very noisy in flight with a distinctive 'whoomph' made on each wing beat. They are often found singluarly, but when a favoured food source is in season, they may be seen feeding en masse. There is no other bird similar on the mainland islands, so it is not possible to confuse it - feral pigeons are much smaller and more drab

Habitat:

These birds exist in most NZ landscapes which have food providing trees for them. They have their favoured fruits (berries on native trees and orchard fruits) and will eat leaves and flowers of plants such as the Tree Lucerne (seen here above) or Kowhai. Interestingly all parts of the Kowhai are actually a poisonous but the pigeon can tolerate this. They will cover great distances to their favoured food sources (a satellite tagged Kereru in Southland flew 480km in 100 days and crossing an open sea channel four times (www.nzbirdsonline.org.nz). Whilst common throughout NZ, they are thriving in areas where predator control (of introduced mustelids and rodents) is carried out

Notes:

The birds in pictures 2-4, above, were decimating a Tree Lucerne, in the middle of winter, right on the side of the road. I saw them as I drove past, and there would have been over 20 in one tree. When I turned around and pulled up to take photos, some moved off so I wasn't able to capture the true magnitude of the feeding frenzy. The first photo is of a Kereru alongside the Tongariro River at Turangi - later that day a friend told me this was a recently released bird, injured and nursed back to fitness by them, a happy coincidence! Due to eating fruit, and storing it in their crop, they can become intoxicated and literally fall out of their trees, or be found 'semi-docile' on the ground. These birds are critical to the survival of many of NZ larger fruiting native trees - since the extinction of the Moa, they are the only bird capable of ingesting the seeds from these trees. Many of the trees have specialised berries which will only germinate after being eaten by these birds.