One of the absolute highlights of my trip to New Zealand was spending a day at Tiritiri Matangi. It was suppose to be an overnight stay but the weather wasn’t with us. It was awesome to see an intesive restoration effort with a large compliment of native birds in it.

Here, we were able to see the unique endemic stitchbird. It’s an interesting lineage of nectivorou with a long history in New Zealand. The feeders were specifically designed to help this species as another of the islands success, the saddleback is more aggressive and will out compete stitchbirds at feeding sites. They are too big to fit here.