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A Glossy Little Bird Who Immediately Transforms Into An Electrifying Beauty, Shining Even Brighter With His Fiery Red Chest – Meet The Mistletoe Flowerpecker!

A compact little bird that transforms into a vision of electrifying beauty with his glossy black back, and vivid red chest, finished off with a black speed stripe running down his belly!

Meet the Mistletoe Flowerpecker

The mistletoe flowerpecker (Dicaeum hirundinaceum) also known as the mistletoebird, is the only Australian representative of the flowerpecker family, Dicaeidae. This is why they are sometimes known as the Australian Flowerpecker. Males have a glossy blue-black head, wings, and back, a bright red throat and chest, a white belly with a central dark streak, and a bright red rump.

Mistletoe Bird” (cropped) by jeans_Photos is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Females are grey above, white below, with a grey streak on the belly, and a paler red rump. Juvenile birds are more like the female, though paler and have an orange, rather than a dark, bill. These birds are swift, sometimes erratic fliers, moving singly or in pairs, usually high up in the canopy.

Mistletoebird (Dicaeum hirundinaceum)” (cropped) by patrickkavanagh is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

This bird is endemic to most of Australia (excluding Tasmania), though also present in the eastern Maluku Islands of Indonesia in the Arafura Sea between Australia and New Guinea. 

File:Mistletoe bird in Erythrina crista-galli 7th Brigade Park Chermside P1150784.jpg” by John Robert McPherson is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Strangely enough, this bird is found wherever mistletoe grows, hence the name mistletoe, and is important in the dispersal of this plant species via seed distribution.

Christopher Watson (http://www.comebirdwatching.blogspot.com/) is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Mistletoebird is highly adapted to its diet of mistletoe berries. It lacks the muscular gizzard (food-grinding organ) of other birds, instead, it has a simple digestive system through which the berries pass quickly, digesting the fleshy outer parts and excreting the sticky seeds onto branches. The seed can then germinate quickly into a new plant. 

Photo Courtesy of JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) / CC BY-SA 4.0

During the breeding season the mistletoebird builds a pear-shaped nest with a slit-like entrance, made from the matted plant down and spider web, which is suspended from a branch or twig in the outer foliage of an appropriate tree. The female alone builds the nest and incubates the eggs, while both sexes feed the young after they hatch.

caught in the act – a Mistletoebird feeding” by PsJeremy is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

There was an ecological balance between the parasitic mistletoe and their host trees before this balance was disturbed with excessive forest clearing. Land clearing to accommodate farming practices and population growth created an imbalance that resulted in excessive infestations of mistletoe in some areas leading to forest degradation and a total lack of mistletoe in other areas. This bird, however, is described as of least concern on the IUCN list.

Dicaeum hirundinaceum -near Lake Ginninderra, Canberra, Australia -male-8 (1)” by Duncan McCaskill is licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Watch and listen to this bird right here below:

H/T Wikipedia – Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

A Bird So Green It Almost Seems To Glow In The Dark!

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