Painted Honeyeater | White-naped Honeyeater | Swan River Honeyeater | Strong-billed Honeyeater | Brown-headed Honeyeater | Blue-faced Honeyeater | White-fronted Honeyeater | Tawny-crowned Honeyeater | Crescent Honeyeater | Black-headed Honeyeater | Black-chinned Honeyeater | White-lined Honeyeater | Singing Honeyeater | Helmeted Honeyeater | Brown Honeyeater | Yellow Honeyeater | Varied Honeyeater | Regent Honeyeater | New Holland Honeyeater | Lewin's Honeyeater |
Molecular markers show the Black-chinned Honeyeater is most closely related to the Brown-headed, while the similarly plumaged Strong-billed Honeyeater was actually an earlier offshoot between 6.7 and 3.4 million years ago.
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It is a member of the genus Melithreptus with several species, of similar size and (apart from the Brown-headed Honeyeater) black-headed appearance, in the honeyeater family Meliphagidae.
All are members of the genus Melithreptus with several species, of similar size and (apart from the Brown-headed Honeyeater) black-headed appearance, in the honeyeater family Meliphagidae.
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Molecular studies show the Black-headed Honeyeater is most closely related to the White-naped Honeyeater, and that their next closest relative is the Swan River Honeyeater.
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Insects form the bulk of the diet, and the Black-headed Honeyeater specialises in foraging among the foliage of trees, as opposed to probing the trunk for prey which is practised by its relative the Strong-billed Honeyeater, and the two species rarely overlap.
The Brown-headed Honeyeater ranges from central-southern Queensland, down through central and eastern New South Wales (though generally west of the Great Dividing Range), across Victoria and into eastern South Australia, where it is found in the Flinders Ranges and around the lower Murray River region.
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Molecular markers show the Brown-headed Honeyeater is most closely related to the Black-chinned Honeyeater, with the Strong-billed Honeyeater an earlier offshoot between 6.7 and 3.4 million years ago.
The IBA supports the second-largest population of the Regent Honeyeater as well as significant numbers of the near threatened Diamond Firetail.
The flowers are pollinated by the Yellow Honeyeater (Lichenostomus flavus) also known locally as the Canary Honeyeater, which hovers in front of the flowers while feeding on the nectar.
Along with the Gibberbird in the genus Ashbyia they were once thought to constitute a separate family, the Epthianuridae, although most taxonomists today treat them as a subfamily, Epthianurinae, of the honeyeater family Meliphagidae.
According to David Steadman it is possible that the 1774 painting by Georg Forster which depicts a mysterious bird from the island of Raiatea (formerly known as Ulieta) is not of a thrush or a honeyeater, as previously hypothesised, but of a relative of the Huahine Starling.
His efforts led to the establishment of the Yellingbo Nature Conservation Reserve in 1965 and the designation of the Helmeted Honeyeater as the state’s bird emblem.
Molecular markers show the Strong-billed Honeyeater separated from the common ancestor of the Brown-headed and Black-chinned Honeyeaters between 6.7 and 3.4 million years ago.
The first bird species found in New Guinea since 1939, the honeyeater was one of over twenty new species discovered by an international team of eleven scientists from Australia, Indonesia and the United States, led by an American ornithologist and Melanesia Conservation International vice-president Bruce Beehler.
The Yellow Honeyeater hovers in front of the spectacular flowers of the wild Bottlebrush Orchid or Coelandria smillieae which appear in northern Queensland between August and November, while feeding upon the nectar and pollinating the flowers.