Mystery bird: mistletoebird, Dicaeum hirundinaceum | @GrrlScientist

This distinctive Australian mystery bird is named for one of its life history traits (includes video) Mistletoebird, Dicaeum hirundinaceum (protonym, Motacilla hirundinacea), Shaw, 1792, also known as the mistletoe flowerpecker, the Australian flowerpecker or as the fire-breasted flowerpecker, photographed in New South Wales, Australia. Image: Marie-Louise Ng, 24 December 2011 (with permission) [velociraptorize].Nikon D7000 Question: This distinctive Australian mystery bird is named for one of its life history traits. What trait is that? Can you identify this bird's taxonomic family and species? Response: This is an adult male mistletoebird, Dicaeum hirundinaceum, which is the only Australian representative of the flowerpecker family, Dicaeidae, a group of passerines that originated in southeast Asia. Dicaeidae consists of 44 species that are placed into only two genera. The flowerpeckers are all morphologically similar, being uniformly small, chunky birds with short tails, short legs, short thick bills and tubular tongues -- the tongue morphology...

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