Friday 18 October 2013

An old Tui tracked down

I received a message yesterday about a colour banded Tui that had been seen and photographed in a Karori garden. Unfortunately one of the colour bands was missing with the bands being B/R-?/M.
 

This narrowed the possibilities down to the bird being one of six banded Tui. As two had been reported dead we were down to four possibilities. Michael, who had reported the bird, was able to identify some of the digits on the metal band including the prefix which was D, so this narrowed the search down to two possibilities. He was then able to identify a sequence of 3 digits being 811 so the band had to be D-181101 not D-185201.
This was a male banded at the Karori Plunket Rooms, Karori Rd on 25 May 2003 and is now at 3797 days from banding our oldest reported Tui. A special thanks to Michael who did some great detective work to identify this bird. Some more of his great photos can be seen on -  

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