Yellow-plumed Honeyeater
Ptilotula ornata
Adult birds primarily olive-brown with heavy gray streaking on the underparts. Named after its long, yellow neck feathers. Adults in the breeding season have an entirely black bill, whereas juveniles and nonbreeding adults have a yellow base to the bill. Juveniles lack breast streaking. Common and noisy in dry woodlands across drier parts of southern Australia.
Identification
The yellow-plumed honeyeater is a medium-sized honeyeater with a relatively long, down-curved black bill, a dark face and a distinctive, upswept yellow neck plume. It has an olive-green head, with a faint yellow line under the dark eye, grey-green upperparts, and heavily streaked grey-brown underparts. Young birds have a yellow bill base and eye-ring.<p>Similar species include purple-gaped honeyeater, grey-fronted honeyeater and fuscous honeyeater.<p>The song is a loud, clear, three-note chier wit chier, often performed before dawn, and by males during display flight.
Taxonomy
- Scientific name
- Ptilotula ornata
- Authority
- (Gould, 1838)
- Order
- Passeriformes
- Family
- Meliphagidae
- Genus
- Ptilotula
Range and habitat
The yellow-plumed honeyeater is endemic to southern mainland Australia, from western New South Wales and Victoria, through South Australia to south-west Western Australia.
- Migration
- Resident species
Behavior
The main habitat type for yellow-plumed honeyeater is mallee. They occupy a broader range of habitat in the west of their range, including dry eucalypt woodland and eucalypt open-forest. They occasionally occur outside their usual habitat, such as in Acacia and Callitris woodland, and seasonally in flowering red ironbark forest, flowering grey box-yellow box woodland. <p>They occur in sedentary, colonial groups, which may relocate in response to harsh conditions. They are noisy and conspicuous, and will jointly defend nesting or feeding territories, by engaging in communal wing quivering displays.<p>Yellow-plumed honeyeaters are mainly insectivorous, foraging actively mainly in outer and upper foliage, branches and trunks of eucalypts, and taking insects on the wing by hawking. They also feed opportunistically on nectar, including from various mallee eucalypts, yellow gum, grey box, red ironbark, and box mistletoe.<p>Yellow-plumed honeyeaters build an open, cup-shaped nest suspended by the rim from foliage or from a thin fork of mallee eucalypts and other small shrubs. Nests are made from wool, green grass and spider webs, and lined with wool, grasses, plant-down and brightly-coloured feathers. Both parents feed the young, sometimes with the assistance of helpers.<p>Yellow-plumed honeyeater nests are parasitised by fan-tailed cuckoos, pallid cuckoos, Horsfield's bronze-cuckoos and shining bronze-cuckoos.
Conservation
- Population trend
- declining
Photos
Distribution
Bird Calls
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