Free The Owl That Fell from the Sky by Brian Gill Page A

They are now one of the commonest small birds in the country.
    Spur-winged plovers arrived in the 1930s and began breeding in the far south of the South Island. They gradually spread, and were first seen breeding in the south of the North Island in the early 1970s. My early years at Auckland Museum coincided with the proliferation of these birds in the Auckland region. Large plovers, they have a brown back, white underparts and a black and white head. The adults have a big spur at the bend on the leading edge of their folded wing (actually the “wrist”). They also sport a fleshy yellow facial patch with pendulous wattles; this leads to their alternative name the masked lapwing, because they look like a dandy at a masked ball. Spur-winged plovers fly slowly but with urgent, clipped wing-beats. With their loud penetrating call, which has been called a staccato rattle, and their fondness for paddocks and grassy fields, they soon attract attention.
    The spotted dove is an escaped cage-bird of south-east Asian origin that has been breeding in low numbers around Auckland since the 1920s. Recently, for unknown reasons, it has become much more common, and more likely to be noticed by residents in the greater Auckland area. Spotted doves are smaller than city pigeons, and predominantly brown with grey and pinkish tones. Adults have a black band finely spotted with white on the back of the neck. They have a distinctive and often persistent cooing call.
    In summer, when the tall New Zealand flax is in flower, common starlings that feed on the nectar often get orange-red pollen smeared on their foreheads. This is usually the explanation when people ring with questions about birds with orange heads. At one time it was popular to build wooden nest-boxes for the garden and people often asked what diameter the entrance hole should be to admit common starlings but exclude common mynas. (The answer is not more than forty-five millimetres.)
    Another common enquiry is about mystery bones discovered at a beach, on a farm, under a house, or in a cave, swamp or sand dune. Usually the bones need to be brought to the museum for direct examination, and we compare them with reference specimens in the collection. Increasingly, however, an emailed digital photograph will do the job, or at least narrow down the possibilities. With large bones there is always the chance they may be of moa, New Zealand’s extinct wingless birds. Occasionally they are. Other bones brought in and added to our collection have belonged to similarly extinct birds such as the North Island adzebill, the North Island goose and the New Zealand coot.
    In even rarer instances, an enquirer will bring in human bones eroded out of prehistoric Māori burial sites. Most often, though, a mysterious bone is from a domestic animal such as a sheep or cow; we have an articulated cow skeleton in the land vertebrates storeroom, useful for pointing out which bone has been found.
    I always thank people for bringing in bones, whatever they turn out to be, because it is important to check them. Once I drove forty kilometres to a harbour headland to find that bones a farmer had uncovered in a pit were horse bones. Similarly, “dinosaur” bones in a south Auckland garden proved to be whale bones.
    Another regular enquiry is about bird bands. Each metal band, or ring, a biologist places on the leg of a bird has a unique number that identifies the bird individually. The New Zealand National Banding Scheme for wild birds is run by the Department of Conservation, but used to be run by the museum in Wellington. Older bands say “SEND DOMINION MUSEUM NEW ZEALAND” or a variation of this, and other bands may have “NATIONAL MUSEUM” in the inscription. Dominion Museum became the National Museum of New Zealand, and then the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, often contracted to “Te Papa”. It is surprising how many senders wrongly add Auckland to the address