Eclectus Parrot

Eclectus Parrot battle analysis

The eclectus parrot turns the usual bird pattern upside down. The female is the brilliant one, red with blue or purple, and she is the one who fights. Good nest hollows high in emergent rainforest trees are rare, so a female that finds one stays with it for most of the year, displaying from the entrance and driving off rival females, sometimes fatally. Males, emerald green and camouflaged in the canopy, spend their time foraging and bringing food, often several of them to one female.

Long-term field work on Cape York showed how unusual this system is. Females mate with several males, groups of males cooperate to feed one brood, and mothers can control the sex of their chicks, often removing young sons from poorer hollows within days of hatching. The male's green plumage also reflects ultraviolet light, which makes him bright to females but hard for predators to see.

In an absolute matchup the eclectus is a mid-sized parrot of about 0.45 kg. The female's readiness to fight over a hollow gives it more ferocity than most parrots, but it has no measured bite, no armor and no talons. It is dangerous only to small rivals at its nest.

Habitat & range

Eclectus parrots live in lowland rainforest from the Moluccas and New Guinea to the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands and the tip of Cape York Peninsula, Australia, where they are restricted to rainforest in the Iron and McIlwraith ranges (Legge et al. 2004). They stay mostly in the canopy and nest in emergent trees. They have been introduced to Palau, Singapore and the Goram Islands (ADW).

Diet & hunting

They feed mainly on fruit and fruit pulp, plus seeds, leaf buds, blossoms, nectar, figs and nuts (Wikipedia, citing Birds of the World). Their oesophagus and proventriculus are wide and stretchy, letting them take in large amounts of food quickly.

Social life

The breeding system is unusual for a parrot. Females mate with several males, and groups can include several males and several females. Multiple males cooperate to feed one female and her chicks. At Iron Range, Cape York, an estimated 538–596 breeding females shared the forest with 1,059–1,173 males (Legge et al. 2004).

Conservation

The Moluccan and Papuan eclectus are both listed as Least Concern by the IUCN, though some small island populations are rarer. The Australian population is small (around 540–600 breeding females at Iron Range) and depends on scarce large nest trees, so it is considered vulnerable to habitat loss (Legge et al. 2004).

Quick answers