What do Rainbow Lorikeets eat?

Our poplar gum has been full of birds in the last couple of weeks – Friarbirds, White-gaped Honeyeaters, Blue-faced Honeyeaters and, more recently still, Rainbow Lorikeets. Most of them are primarily nectar feeders but the tree was not in blossom until a couple of days ago so I figured they had to be after insects. A series of three action shots as fluky as the honeyeater’s tongue shows an example:

Rainbow Lorikeet foraging, scale insect on leaf at left of photo
Rainbow Lorikeet foraging, scale insect in centre of leaf at left of photo
rainbow lorikeet seizing scale insect
Gotcha! Rainbow Lorikeet seizing scale insect
leaf minus insect
No scale insect. Rainbow Lorikeet in background, if you look hard enough

As usual, clicking on these images will take you to larger versions.

Bottlebrush and birds

Our red bottlebrush (Callistemon) has joined the mango (now just about finished), paperbark, poplar gum and macadamia in bursting into flower. It is far smaller than the first three, although still three or four metres high, and the flowers are attractive to the birds as well as to us.

Lorikeet amongst bottlebrush flowers
Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus) amongst bottlebrush flowers
Lorikeet feeding on bottlebrush
I wonder if it tastes as good as it looks?

I have seen Friarbirds feeding on the blossom, too, and a few insects – native bees, for instance.

Pop(u)lar Gum in blossom

Our huge Poplar Gum (Eucalyptus platyphylla) has, as predicted, burst into flower – suddenly and exuberantly. The trigger seems to have been the few millimetres of gentle rain which arrived on Sunday, since by Monday the whole tree looked like this:

creamy gum blossom
Poplar gum blossom

It has become enormously popular with the Rainbow Lorikeets (Trichoglossus haematodus) in consequence. They have abandoned the paperbark (they had nearly stripped it, anyway) and dozens of them at a time are feeding in the canopy.

Rainbow Lorikeet in the Poplar Gum
Rainbow Lorikeet in the Poplar Gum
two lorikeets arguing
Two lorikeets disputing over the flowers

Anyone standing beneath the tree is showered with the caps off the flower buds, and with fragments of twigs, leaves and flowers.

The birds keep up a screeching racket which bursts out even louder when they squabble, as they often do.

With all that, they are (as I said last week) very difficult to see. They have an amazing knack of vanishing into the leaves. When you watch for a while, you can see most of the ‘why’ and ‘how’: they have to walk around on the small branches and reach out through the leaves to the flowers, because the flower stems are not strong enough to take their weight.

Lorikeet with head showing through leaves
Now you see it …

Their colours are surprisingly good camouflage, too, as the bright blue head becomes sky in sunlight and grey branch in shadow, while the green and yellow become leaves.

How much of the bird can you see in the small picture here? Click on it for a larger version and look again.