Finally, one more point is that adults feeding nestlings often need to have a few goes at making the presented item go down the right track. Nestlings do not seem to have the technique to do this for themselves, and otherwise might sit there pathetically with a mouth full of arthropod. In this case, not unusually, there were 4 or 5 goes by the RWB. On top of that, nestlings seem to have glutinous saliva (perhaps to help gather in offerings). Here, repeated in-and-outs led to salivary glutinous threads connecting the participants. Actually, this is not all that unusual a sight. As you can imagine, this was quite an adventure for Mr Spider. “Tell you what”, he said, “that will be the last time I doze off when one of those wattlebirds is on the prowl in koel season”. “Me too”, said the green caterpillar. Below is a less cropped version of the original image. Incidentally, the young koel left the nest today and was last seen being fed in the crown of a small euc.
