Olive - backed Sunbird

One of the delights of a lush garden in tropical Queensland is the sight of Olive-backed Sunbirds flitting about among the flowers, probing them with its gracefully curved bill, often while hovering.  Equally enchanting is stumbling across its strange, suspended nest, hanging from a twig or part of a building by a long, thin cord of grass and fibres.  Sunbirds are often rather confiding when nesting in people’s gardens, allowing a close approach if you are quiet and this is just what happened on our veranda at Innisfail, Queensland.

Sunbird Male

 

 This is the nest that the Sunbirds built on this wire.  They can come back time after time to the same nest, repairing it when they are going to breed again.

The Olive-backed Sunbird is a small Honeyeater-like bird, only 11- 12cm long, having with a distinctive down-curved bill. On the male, the head is yellowish-olive with a yellow supercilium and a yellow moustachial stripe. The upper parts are also yellowish-olive except for the tail, which is black with a white tip. An iridescent dark-bluish or dark-violet gorget extends from the chin to the upper breast; the rest of the under body is bright yellow. The dark brown and the under wing is yellowish white with brownish grey flight feathers. The bill is black and the feet dark grey. 

The female appears similar but a little paler, and lacks the iridescent gorget, being wholly yellow underneath.

This is the female sitting on the nest.  She sat so still and never seem to move.

Breeding

The Olive-backed Sunbird builds a long, spindle-shaped nest that is suspended from a branch or from an overhanging part of a building such as an eave, veranda or clothesline via a long cord made of entwined grass, fibres and bark. Two pale-grey eggs are laid which are incubated by the female. The nestlings are brooded by the female only, and both parents fed the young

First glimpse of the 2 chicks.

Feeding

The Olive-backed Sunbird forages among the foliage and flowers of trees and shrubs. It gleans invertebrates from the leaves and flowers, and probes flowers with its long, curved bill to take nectar, often hovering to do so. They sometimes pluck insects from spider webs.

This (to me) seems a very big spider for a very young chick!

The peculiar breeding behaviour regarding these birds is that they will abandon their completed nest for about a week before the female returns to lay her clutch of one or two greenish-blue eggs. One reason why these birds would abandon their nest for a week or so might be to fool a cuckoo waiting to parasitise the nest, and another idea which had been suggested is that this might fool snakes or other predators. 

In this video, the first bird you will see is the male Sunbird and both Sunbirds are making alarms calls to try and distract the Yellow - spotted Honeyeater that appears second in the video. 

 

It can be accessed at  http://youtu.be/odZK_EL8DtM

 

If there is a black space below,click it and the video will appear.

 

 

I hope you enjoyed this post about the Olive-backed Sunbird. 

Thanking for visiting.

 

I am linking this post with Wild Bird Wednesday