NZ Grey Warbler

A tiny bird, with a big song, that flits at the speed of a silver bullet. Despite this, The Mistress kept waving me about and I dutifully managed to catch this one singing it's heart out. The Mistress has been reading all about it so has copied the information below..

The grey warbler is New Zealand’s most widely distributed endemic bird species, based on the number of 10 x 10 km grid squares it occupied over the whole country in a 1999-2004 survey. It vies with rifleman for the title of New Zealand’s smallest bird, with both weighing about 6 g. The title usually goes to rifleman, based on its shorter tail and therefore shorter body length.

The grey warbler is more often heard than seen, having a loud distinctive song, and tending to spend most of its time in dense vegetation.

Identification
The grey warbler is a tiny, slim grey songbird that usually stays among canopy foliage. It is olive-grey above, with a grey face and off-white underparts. The tail is darker grey, getting darker towards the tip, contrasting with white tips to the tail feathers, showing as a prominent white band in flight. The black bill is finely pointed, the eye is bright red, and the legs are black and very slender. Grey warblers often glean insects from the outside of the canopy while hovering, which no other New Zealand bird does, making them identifiable by behaviour from a long distance.

Voice: a characteristic long trilled song. The song is louder than expected, given the bird’s size. Only males sing, although females do give short chirp calls, usually as a contact call near the male. Nestlings and fledglings have a high pitched begging call. Begging calls are mimicked by their brood parasite, the shining cuckoo, while in the nest and as a dependent fledgling.

They are known to sing just before it rains.