Pīpīwharauroa - a fledgling learns to fly

I was walking down Kākāriki Spur in the Brook Waimārama Sanctuary on Saturday, and a bird stumbled and tumbled across the track in front of me. It came to a stop in some native grass beside the track and froze. It took me a few seconds to realise it was a pīpīwharauroa (shining cuckoo) fledgling, the iridescent blue green I'm used to seeing on these birds was very subdued and more of a dull grey. Clearly it had not yet learned to fly. I watched for a couple of minutes, and started wondering where its foster parents (riroriro / grey warbler) were. Sure enough a few minutes later there they were. I spent the next 45 minutes with them (although lost them for about 10 minutes) and took over 2000 photos. I've split the blog posts up to reduce the size of each post. The first post (this one) is the cuckoo learning to hop and fly. The next posts are focused on the feeding activity.

For more information on the relationship between these two species, see my earlier blog posts from 2024-10-08 and 2025-01-09. Or see the bird pages for them at NZBirdsOnline: Pīpīwharauroa, Riroriro

The fledgling in the grass frozen (afraid of my movement at a guess) after stumbling across the track. My guess is it had just left its nest (the riroriro nest). The sun came out briefly for this photo and the iridescence was a little more obvious.

A few minutes later the foster parents turned up with breakfast for their foster child. They were probably waiting for me to step back a little, or the hungry baby to leave.

I froze like a statue and waited. Within half a minute the fledgling flapped its wings and glided/flew down the side of the spur, the foster parents immediately followed. I lost sight for a while (and was distracted by a ngirungiru (tomtit) fledgling.

Ten minutes later I spotted the riroriro pair again, and followed them. Sure enough they led me to the pīpīwharauroa fledgling on a branch about 5m off the ground, and I witnessed the first feeding. I'll leave the feeding photos for a later post and focus on the fledgling practicing hopping / flying from branch to branch.

A sequence flapping its wings and getting ready for a flight/hop to a lower branch.

Whoops! A belly flop.

Pretty sure it's thinking "I was in complete control! Delete that last photo!"

All this hard work is generating an appetite. This bird was pretty quiet but made an occasional begging chirp.

The next sequence was a minute or two later, and the bird seemed to want to go up rather than down. Various short hops / flights up to the next branch, or the next tree. Each time it moved I also had to move to find a window through the foliage for a good view.

The next sequence is another flying hop. Still has a bit to learn about the landings. Under certain angles the iridescence shows up quite nicely.

The next sequence is mostly a hop, wings aren't really used. By the way, I was shooting at 20 frames per second all day, and this is seven consecutive images. So the first to last photo covers a time span of a third of a second.