Family MELIPHAGIDAE Vigors, 1825

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• Meliphagidae Vigors, 1825.

Introduction

The meliphagids are a large polyphyletic family with 174 species in 44 genera broadly distributed from east of Wallace's Line, in the eastern Indonesian Archipelago, to the Pacific islands (Dickinson 2003). Australia and New Guinea form the centre of distribution, Australia having 72 species in 24 genera (55% of the world species), and 140 ultrataxa. Many of these species are endemic. They include a diverse range of birds, as diverse as friarbirds (Philemon), Australian chats (Epthianura and Ashbyia), Striped Honeyeater (Plectorhyncha) and Painted Honeyeater (Grantiella). Plumages and sizes vary from the large wattlebirds to the diminutive Myzomela. Many species are migratory while others show local movements. All have specialised tongues for feeding.

Australian honeyeaters occupy a large selection of habitats from tall wet forests to shrublands, heaths and mangroves. Some have colonial habits, forming large aggressive flocks, while others are found singly or in small groups coming together only at feeding sources. Most are nectivorous, and all procure insects. The majority of the species are aerial or arboreal feeders; some are occasionally terrestrial or scansorial. They obtain their food by gleaning, hang gleaning, hawking, probing and snatching. Numbers of birds often gather at feeding aggregations where dominant birds aggressively protect the food source by chasing interlopers from flowering trees.

Nests are variable within the family. Some are large stick structures placed securely in tree forks, others are simple cup-shaped nests suspended in the outer canopy of trees or shrubs. A few are of a more delicate design and are composed of bark and cobweb; these are suspended from the outer limbs of trees and shrubs, often over water. Two or three, sometimes four, eggs form a clutch although honeyeaters in the extreme south-west of Western Australia often have a single egg. Eggs generally have the base colour varying from white to salmon; all are marked with blotches, spots or dots of hues of red, grey and browns, more often as a coronial effect.

Excluded Taxa

Misidentifications

MELIPHAGIDAE: Cissomela Bonaparte, 1854 [although recognised, following Christidis & Boles (2008), as a monotypic genus for Cissomela pectoralis, that species is now generally assigned to the genus Certhionyx and that is followed here; thus Cissomela becomes a junior synonym of Certhionyx]

Diagnosis

'Like Australasian corvoids, honeyeaters also have a basically single deep trabeculated fossa in the head of the humerus, though some members such as Conopophila develop a depression in the position of the second, trending towards the double condition (cf. Bock 1962). Feet are strong too, with scutellate bilamini-plantar tarsi… The temporal fossa is usually small and flanked by a zygomatic process that is commonly slenderly prolonged and longer than the postorbital. The nares are fully perforate, as in the Australian robins, but the palate, as in other nectar-feeders (e.g. sunbirds, Nectariniidae), is characteristically slender and attenuately streamlined, with thickened stems to the palatines, laterally flared and back-swept medial palatine shelves, and thin, much prolonged transpalatine processes, giving the palate a rakish appearance; the vomer is variously truncate at the tip, its horns usually reduced in simple divaricating nipples. To strengthen the bill for probing, the nasal bars are much thickened and furnished with one or two distinctive foramina. In association, the ectethmoid plate is also broadly winged and thickened, developing a bracing 'foot' along the jugal bar in many genera and a deep latero-ventral groove (fossa) in the position where the lachrymal would be inserted if it were present.'

Diagnosis References

Bock, W.J. 1962. The pneumatic fossa of the humerus in the Passeres. Auk 79: 425-443

Schodde, R. & Mason, I.J. 1999. The Directory of Australian Birds : Passerines. A Taxonomic and Zoogeographic Atlas of the Biodiversity of Birds in Australia and its Territories. Collingwood, Australia : CSIRO Publishing x 851 pp.

History of changes