How do birds cope with drought? Migratory birds can move around to find the best resources any time of year, but species that are year-round residents, like fairywrens, are often restricted to dealing with tough environmental conditions wherever they are. If fairywrens obtain most of their food from insects, and insects depend on plants and other invertebrates for food, and plants depend on rain to grow, how does a fairywren get by during a drought?

I’m pondering this question on a Brisbane to Adelaide flight high above Australia. The dirt has just changed from brown to red and everywhere I look the effects of the drought are clear. There is little green below me.

Recent rainfall amounts from the government showing the little rain received in the interior.

How are the fairywrens near you coping? When you submit your fairywren sightings to eBird and include information on the plumage types, breeding behaviors, and group sizes you see, you are helping us answer these questions. Using your sightings, we can ask questions like how does drought influence when fairywrens breed and how does drought influence whether or not fairywrens cooperate to breed? One might expect that in harsh conditions, related individuals should work together to raise offspring collectively instead of breeding on their own, and with your help we can test these hypotheses.

Allison and I are supplementing the information you are sending us via eBird by making some observations ourselves. In the next 10 days we’ll be traveling from Bendigo, Victoria, a relatively wet habitat for White-winged and Purple-backed Fairywrens, north to near Fowler’s Gap, New South Wales, a very dry habitat for these species. Along this wet to dry transect, we’ll be stopping at eBird birding hotspots to observe plumage types, breeding behaviors, and group sizes in different environments.

Image courtesy of Google.

Want to see what we’re seeing? Follow us on facebook, twitter, and instagram for updates (when we have access to internet). You can also follow our latest sightings by following my eBird page and checking out my latest checklists: https://ebird.org/profile/NjE3NDE2/AU

Happy birding!

Joe (& Allison)

We’ve received our first data update from eBird which includes any checklists submitted in the month of August. We received 286 checklists from 60 observers in the month of August alone! We’re really excited about these numbers. We made these graphics which we posted on social media recently to share the news:

Thank you to all of our participants!

Important news for the Fairywren Project and our participants! The 2018 eBird annual taxonomy update has taken place and one of the major changes is the split of the Variegated and Purple-backed Fairywrens. The Variegated Fairywren range has been updated to east of the Great Dividing Range in Southeast Queensland, while the Purple-backed Fairywren can be found west of the GDR, with an overlap zone between the species in parts of South-east QLD and North-East NSW.

In terms of determining which species you’re looking at in the overlap zone, Matt Gilfedder of eBird Australia reports: “The main feature to focus on in order to identify these species from each other is the colour of the mantle on the brightly coloured males.  In the east-edge of their range, Purple-backed have a “mid violet blue” mantle, compared to the “royal blue” of the Variegated.”

See the eBird Australia article for more information and photos of each of the species. We will update our species descriptions on the Fairywren Project in the next couple weeks to reflect this change.

The ecology and breeding biology of the Lovely Fairywren has been described for the first time! Friend of the Fairywren Project, Ana Leitão, has been researching these fascinating birds for a number of years and her first publication has just arrived.

One of the most interesting findings to us at the Fairywren Project is that Lovely Fairywren males maintain their bright breeding plumage year-round! This trait separates them from the rest of the Australian fairywrens where most males molt into a dull non-breeding plumage at the end of the breeding season and a bright breeding plumage prior to the beginning of the next breeding season. Males of some of these species are known to molt from bright plumage to bright plumage, but it’s rare for the entire population (or species!) to exhibit this. The fact that the Lovely Fairywren molts from bright plumage to bright plumage reminds us more of the White-shouldered Fairywrens in New Guinea which are also known to exhibit this trait. 

Figure 1. (a) Male and female Lovely Fairy-Wren (Malurus amabilis) colour differences, frontal view and (b) dorsal view. (c) Dependent juvenile with duller version of the female plumage. Photos by Ana Leitão.

You can read and download the paper for yourself from the Emu – Austral Ornithology and find the paper summary below:

Project stickers are here! Joe will be at the Birds Queensland monthly meeting on August 2nd to pass out free stickers. See the Birds Queensland website for info on the time and location.

Red-backed Fairywren:

Splendid Fairywren:

Chestnut-shouldered fairywren: