On The Up: Havelock North couple find and nurse 3 hatchlings hidden in their Christmas tree

Hana Buscke feeds Frinch, Grinch and Egg, the three chicks found in their family Christmas tree.

You’ve probably heard of a partridge in a pear tree, but have you heard of three greenfinch hatchlings in a Christmas tree?

Like most of us, Havelock North couple Ben and Hana Buscke get a Christmas tree each year, and this year decided to pick their own at Birdwoods Gallery’s Christmas tree farm.

The Busckes picked their tree in late November, then Birdwoods staff cut it down and helped drag it back to the Busckes’ ute.

After a quick drive back to their home, the Busckes took the tree out and stood it up to give it a trim.

That’s when Ben looked down and saw he almost trod on a small hatchling lying on the ground.

“I picked it up and realised it had fallen from the tree,” Ben said.

The Busckes quickly retraced their steps, where they found another baby bird lying in the bed of the ute.

They went back to their Christmas tree and fossicked through the branches and sure enough found another baby bird, still tucked up in its nest.

The Busckes had become the surprise foster parents to three hungry and confused chicks.

The chicks when they were first found in the Busckes' Christmas tree.

Fortunately for the hatchlings, Ben owned and ran a pet rescue for exotic animals and worked in the animal industry for many years, so playing the part of mother bird was nothing new to him.

The hatchlings were put back into their nest and then put in a shoebox with wool to keep them warm and limit their movement.

Ben bought kitten food and baby cereal, mixed it all together and started feeding the chicks with a pair of tweezers.

“Tweezers are basically like a bird’s beak, where they put it down their throat, so it’s nice and hard, and they react to it straight away,” Ben said.

Ben Buscke feeds Finch, Grinch and Egg soon after they were found in the Buscke family Christmas tree.

But the species of the chicks was still a mystery to Ben.

“It’s hard to tell what they are at that stage – they all look the same,” he said.

Three weeks later, green feathers started to emerge and the Busckes realised they were parents to three greenfinches.

European greenfinches were introduced to New Zealand from Britain between 1862 and 1868 and are now commonly seen throughout much of the mainland, feeding on seeds, including crop seeds. The bird is classified as a pest in some parts of the country.

Now the species was identifiable, the Busckes named the birds Finch, Grinch and Egg.

Finch and Grinch were the larger of the trio and stuck together, while the smaller Egg plays by his own rules.

“The small one I just called Egg because he was a character,” Ben said.

“He goes, ‘no, I’m not doing that. I’m doing what I want to do’.

“He was actually teaching the other two how to survive really – otherwise, I think he would have been pushed out of the nest.”

The Busckes bought a parrot cage once the chicks started flying from their nest.

But the triplets quickly outgrew that, and Ben had to construct an outdoor enclosure.

Finch, Grinch and Egg in the aviary on the Busckes' Havelock North property.

That only lasted a week before the chicks outgrew that too, leading Ben to construct a 6m long by 3m by 2m tunnel “with lots of trees and everything else”.

Soon, the birds were learning to fly and watching other birds.

“They learned pretty quick,” Ben said.

Whereas the birds had been all over the Busckes in the early days when they entered the enclosure to feed them, they were now avoiding the couple and fending for themselves.

Therefore, Ben let the doors of their cage open last week and set them free.

“It’s always touch-and-go when you try to rehabilitate animals but this time it was amazing,” he said.

“Fingers crossed that one day they’ll come back.”

Jack Riddell is a multimedia journalist with Hawke’s Bay Today and has worked in radio and media in the UK, Germany, and New Zealand.