By Annie Hill
The original article in Russell Lights | Ngā Mārama o Kororāreka, July 2026 edition
Recently, while staying in Cambridge, in the Waikato, I was reminded of how incredibly privileged I am to live in the Bay of Islands. Cambridge’s streets are lined with trees and there’s a delightful, leafy park, but it was rare to see a native among all those pines and plane trees. This was reflected in the bird life: introduced birds abounded, but in the couple of days I was there, I didn’t even hear let alone see a Tūī. In Russell, they’re ubiquitous and plentiful, a constant delight with their songs, and swooping, noisy flight.
Tūī, Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae, are endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand and the only bird in its genus. A large, Australasian honeyeater, its only living relative here, is the Korimako Bellbird, Anthornis melanura, the two species diverging around 5 million years ago. There’s a subspecies, P. n. Chathamensis, found only on the Chatham Islands.
Highly regarded by Māori, the birds were considered a messenger between the earth and the spiritual realm, their beautiful songs carrying messages from the gods. Their feathers were highly prized for cloaks and the birds were also eaten, and preserved in gourds. Their importance is perhaps indicated by the fact that Māori have14 other names for Tūī, including “kōkō”. Europeans were also impressed with Tūī, when they saw them during Cook’s first voyage, finding “[t]he flesh is most delicious, and was the greatest luxury the woods afforded us.” European colonists thought the ‘poi’ were reminiscent of clerical garb and called them parson birds.
Tūī are between 27 and 32 cm in length, with the heavier male weighing between 65 and150 g, while females are 58–105 g.
Tūī are exuberant, medium-sized, apparently black birds. However, in bright light, their feathers are iridescent blue, green and bronze, and they have distinctive white throat tufts (poi). Their heads are greeny-black, with beautiful, lacy-looking feathers around the back of their neck and shoulders. The feathers on their back are brown, while their wings and tails shimmer with blue and green. The sexes look alike, but the male is larger. Their wings are short and wide, giving excellent manoeuvrability in dense forest, but requiring rapid flapping, interspersed with short glides. The distinctive whirring sound they make, particularly when challenging another bird, is caused by the quivering of the notched, eighth primary feather.
While known for their beauty, Tūī are even more renowned for their astonishing vocal repertoire, a loud and complicated mix of tuneful, poignant notes, coughs, clicks, cackles, creaks and wheezes. Many of their notes are beyond the reach of human hearing and they have a dual voice box so that they can make two sounds at the same time. Songs, similar to that of Korimako (without the coughs and clicks), and often influenced by them, vary according to location, season, sex and individual variation. Tūī are one of the first birds to be heard before dawn and the last after sunset. In flight, they maintain contact with a repetitive scream. They’re fine mimics and were often trained by Māori to ‘talk’ and can imitate breaking glass, car alarms, classical music, advertising jingles and mobile phones.
Tūī are found throughout the motu, from Raoul Island to the Auckland Islands. Populations have declined considerably since European settlement, mainly as a result of widespread habitat destruction and predation by invasive species, but they’re classified by the IUCN as being of ‘least concern’. In some areas, particularly where vegetation has regenerated, populations have rebounded, but the slightly larger Chatham Islands’ Tūī, is still struggling.
The birds prefer low altitude, broadleaf forests, but will accept remnant patches, exotic plantations and well-vegetated suburbs; in many places they’re common garden birds. Usually seen singly, in pairs, or in small family groups, they can congregate in large numbers at ample food sources, often in company with other birds, but tending to dominate and attempting to drive them away. I’ve heard it suggested that Korimako have not re-populated this area due to the abundance of bellicose Tūī.
(On the other hand, Tūī’s absence on the Poor Knights Islands is probably due to the very high density of Korimako competing for limited supplies of nectar.) There’s much local movement, they seek out flowering or fruiting plants, such as kōwhai. They typically nest in native forest and scrub, but will commute more than 10 km daily to feed on rich sources of nectar. Tūī are important pollinators of flowering plants, and also disperse seeds from trees bearing medium-sized fruits.
Male Tūī are notoriously aggressive, and will defend all or part of a food source, from most other birds, vigorously and noisily chasing them away. They dive rapidly through the canopy with a great whirring of wings towards other birds, frightening and then pursuing them through the foliage, with a spectacular display of aerobatics. To intimidate rivals, they often erect their body feathers to appear larger, and will even mob harriers and magpies.
Tūī are monogamous and their mating display, often seen in early spring, involves rising at speed in a vertical climb in clear air, before stalling and dropping into a powered dive, then repeating. The nest, built by the female, is a rough bulky structure of twigs and sticks, lined with fine grasses, high in the canopy or sub-canopy. Only the female incubates and broods the clutch of 2–4 eggs, laid from September to January. Initially, she is the one who feeds the chicks, but later the male helps. The eggs take about 14 days to hatch and chicks fledge 20 days later. The parents continue to feed the fledglings for another couple of weeks. Tūī live 12 years or more, in the wild.
Their diet varies, depending on availability, and they prefer nectar and honeydew, shifting or commuting to good nectar sources, such as pūriri, kōwhai, rewarewa and flax. In the breeding season, requiring more protein, they eat large invertebrates such as cicadas and stick insects. In autumn, medium-sized fruit such as wineberry, kaikōmako, māhoe and ngaio make up much of their diet. In winter, banksia, pūriri, and tree lucerne are important nectar sources, with pollen and seeds also occasionally eaten. Tūī seem particularly fond of flax, whose nectar sometimes ferments, resulting in the birds flying as though drunk. Flax, kōwhai and kaka beak have flowers similar in shape to the Tūī’s beak: an excellent example of mutualistic co-evolution.
Tūī are preyed on by possums (which eat eggs and chicks), stoats and rats. Cats are another threat and the common Myna competes with Tūī for food and sometimes takes eggs. Surprisingly, considering Tūīs’ nature, the smaller blackbird will successfully compete for territory. However, Tūī respond extremely well to pest control programmes and in spite of the loss of most of lowland forest in Aotearoa New Zealand, they’ve probably benefited from many of the introduced flowering and fruiting plants. These, along with new plantings of natives and sugar-water feeders in gardens, now provide Tūī with a reliable year-round supply of nectar and fruit. On the whole, this is one endemic species which is thriving.
Tūī | Tui | Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae