I was watching a potential nest hole, and a female arrived to enter the cavity. I had a clear view of her leg bands. Her ID was S-RO. I was immediately aware that this combination was unfamiliar to me, so I looked up the database to see what her story was. She did not exist! No such bird had been translocated to the Brook.
There were two possible explanations for this:-
- A banding error. When banded, her leg band combination had been incorrectly recorded. I looked through the database at undetected birds (parakeets released into the Brook who had not been seen since release), there are nine undetected females, but no combination is anything like Red over Orange. E.g., S-BG is undetected, perhaps someone erroneously recorded Blue over Green as Red over Orange. It seems unlikely, yet here she is..... or,
- A bird with this combination (S-RO) was last seen in the Hurunui Valley (inland Canterbury) three years earlier. Could she have flown 200 km north looking for more of her species, and stopped three years later when she found some in the Brook Waimārama Sanctuary?
The only possibility for solving this conundrum would be to find her again with better camera gear, and get close enough to record the numbers on her silver band on her left leg. It seems unlikely this will ever happen, so it's destined to remain a mystery.
