"The City of the Tui" Top 5 Page for this destination Wellington Favorite Tip by Kakapo2

Favorite thing: The other thing that absolutely fascinates me about Wellington is partly linked to the mass of pohutukawa around the place. Those trees are the perfect food source for honeyeaters and therefore attract the tui in the thousands.

Those big blackish birds with their fluorescent feathers and the distinctive white tufts on the throat fly around everywhere, even in the busy centre – wherever you find pohutukawa or NZ flax. I have photographed them in front of Parliament, in the Botanic Garden, at the War Memorial, just about everywhere.

The facts that we do not have tui in Christchurch surely adds to my fascination with those birds. Our main honeyeater is the bellbird. Having such exotic birds in a city centre where you would rather expect concrete buildings and traffic jams, adds to this fascination.

Photo 2 shows a tui singing in a tree next to the War Memorial.