Tuis are from New Zealand. I was there on holiday recently and took the chance to see a lot of birds I normally don’t get to see (I’m from Australia). New Zealand has a really unique space in terms of animal life, because it’s so isolated. Before the arrival of humans (less than 1000 years ago), there were no large mammals, and no notable land based predators. This means that birds there have filled a lot of niches that would normally be filled by mammals, and also, many of them have lost the ability to fly well (or at all), because flying put them at more risk of air based predators. Some of the birds (like the New Zealand Robins) have no fear, and will come right up to people as they scavenge around looking for insects you might have disturbed.

As a result, since the arrival of humans and the introduction of dogs, rats, stoats, introduced birds etc many New Zealand birds have gone extinct, or under serious threat of extinction. Thankfully the Tui isn’t one of them, and is doing relatively well compared to a lot of other NZ native birds. They’re a pretty common sight around most of NZ.

That being said, this guy was on Tiritiri Matangi Island, which was an absolute experience itself. The island is a nature reserve, that has been reforested over the last 30 years, and has had a great deal of effort put in to clearing it off all of the introduced land based predators. So birds that are rare elsewhere thrive on this island. Even though the Tui in the photo is quite common, I got to see a lot of other birds that you’re unlikely to see on the mainland. It’s one of a handful of similar islands around the country, but in this close, it was only a 90 minute ferry ride from the capital city of Auckland, which makes it very accessible. New Zealand has had so much success with projects like these, they’re now introducing similar zones on the mainland. Zealandia, near Wellington is on the mainland, and completely fenced off from land predators with carefully designed fences, and the use of mammal specific poison within the sanctuary for critters that do slip through. The goal is over the next decade, to clear the whole city of Wellington from land based predators https://wellington.govt.nz/news-and-events/news-and-information/our-wellington/2024/11/predator-free-wellington-to-expand-efforts-citywide