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Pardalotus striatus
A very small (9cm, 3.5 inches), short-tailed bird that is more often heard than seen, foraging noisily for lerps and other small creatures in the treetops. Striated Pardalotes occupy a vast range of habitat types, from tall mountain rainforest to arid scrubland, and are found in all parts of Australia except some of the Western Australian deserts.
Stringybark eucalyptus (Eucalyptus obliqua) tree bole.
We heard this bird for years before we finally found it nesting in this tree hollow. I assume that is the male on the edge of the hollow guarding the nest.
Spotted on Sep 26, 2009
Submitted on Jun 16, 2011
6 Comments
good catch!! considering it's size!!
Yes Emma. I did wonder if I shouldn't photoshop in an arrow. ;) It's one of those birds who sticks to the shadows and flies below the tree tops. Which is why we only ever caught fleeting glimpses of it and never saw it well enough to identify it. If it we're not for having the binoculars that day, I doubt we would be able to say for certain that was it.
No problem. As with most other parts of the world, habitat loss is the biggest problem for Australian animals. Tasmania has a huge logging industry, and they always make the point of saying that 'trees re-grow, so its not like we are losing forests'. But of course the mono-cultured plantations they re-plant not only lack all of the diversity of native forests, their thirty-year logging rotation never allows time for tree hollows to develop, and many of our birds and mammals rely on just such hollows to raise their young. We're actually looking at bringing in an arborist to scale some of our taller trees and attach nesting boxes.
Btw, that tree looks the way it does because brush-tail possums nest in the limb crotches during the day, and they like to tear the bark off to find the insects underneath.
This comment is related to Petaurus.
This bird must have good voice as colour suggests. Yellow and Black (not every) birds have good voice.
There it is !! that teeny weeny little bird!
Thanks Lori for giving Idea of Marsupial mammals from Australia..!!