BirdingNZ.net

Hi all. Noticed a pair of tui feeding on rotting Mandarins in suburban Hamilton. Has anybody else seen this behaviour?

Yep! It’s pretty common I reckon. Bellbirds will do the same. From what I’ve seen they don’t break into the fruit themselves but they’ll quite happily mop up a kaka or a silver eyes leftovers.

I use slices of mandarin to attract Tuis to my nectar feeder when I put it out in the autumn.

I'm not sure whether they really like them, or just eat them to spite the Wax Eyes.

The tuis around our place are (so far) leaving our citrus alone, but they get stuck into the persimmons in a big way, as do the silvereyes. But then our mandarin and orange trees are quite small, and we tend to pick every available fruit and not leave anything lying around for the birds. There are usually some spare fruit under the grapefruit, which the silvereyes get into (also the possums, though I've caught five in the last couple of weeks and hopefully on top of them for now (EDIT: six as of this morning, this one right beside the grapefruit, so maybe not quite on top of them!)), but haven't so far seen any interest in them from the tuis.

My Tuis like their mandarins peeled.