So, the Singing Honeyeater

["Kim Farley via Canberrabirds " <>]

Thank you Geoffrey.  Very good.  Thinking about Singing Honeyeater has also brought the handsome Striped Honeyeater to my mind. This is another occasional visitor to the ACT, which was most recently seen, heard and photographed in Higgins in April this year - as reported in eBird. The Striped is another "inland" species with a distribution extending to the coast from around about Townsville to around about the central coast of NSW. I see and hear  them on the central coast very regularly. 

Maybe you have some interesting thoughts on the Striped, Geoffrey?

Kim

On Sat, Sep 20, 2025 at 1:38 PM Geoffrey Dabb <> wrote:

Thank you Kim.  The Gould plate of this species was by Henry Richter who was employed by John Gould to work on the illustrations after the death of Elizabeth in 1841 at age 37.

 

In the below I should have said ‘south-western Victoria’ not ‘south-eastern’.  The narrow coastal strip used by this species extends from South Australia in the west to about Westernport in the east.  There is an informative map in Directory of Australian Birds, Schodde & Mason, 1999.  This shows, in my view, how the sandy coastal strip might have been colonised from the  west by a population that became specialist feeders on the coastal shrubbery, not advancing inland.

 

Below is a comment in Belcher 1914.

 

 

From: Kim Farley <>
Sent: Friday, 19 September 2025 6:40 PM
To: Geoffrey Dabb <>
Cc: Canberrabirds <>
Subject: Re: [Canberrabirds] So, the Singing Honeyeater

 

A very interesting post Geoffrey. Some folk might wonder if the blank areas on the maps reflect lack of observers rather than a lack of Singing Honeyeaters. But my quick look at an eBird Species Map for the super widespread Aust Magpie shows pretty much all those blank areas filled with Magpie reports. So, the blank spaces are indeed indicative of a lack of Singing Honeyeaters rather than a lack of observers

Kim

PS I presume the painting is an Elizabeth Gould work? If so, she did a lovely job of it. Much better than her Pilotbird

 

On Fri, Sep 19, 2025 at 1:32 PM Geoffrey Dabb via Canberrabirds <> wrote:

is making one of its infrequent visits here.  This is an excuse for mentioning again the unusual occurrence pattern.  In south-eastern Victoria, this is almost exclusively coastal.  Below eBird locations are from this year so far. John Gould, from the slight information available, had said ‘I have abundant evidence that the range of this species extends across the entire continent of Australia from east to west’.  Broadly true, except for some extensive blank spaces.

 

 

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