Family ORIOLIDAE Vigors, 1825

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• Oriolidae Vigors, 1820.

Introduction

Oriolidae is a widespread family of Old World origin. It occurs across Africa and Eurasia and down through the Indonesian archipelago to Australia. There are 29 species in two genera, one of which, Sphecotheres, is endemic to Australia, New Guinea and the eastern Indonesian Archipelago. Both genera occur in Australia, represented by three species, in turn represented by ten ultrataxa. Within the continent they occur in all States and Territories.

Arboreal by nature oriolids spend a vast amount of time searching for insectivorous prey (orioles) or feeding on fruits (figbirds). Orioles are generally regarded as being solitary or occurring in small groups, whereas the figbirds are well known to be gregarious, large flocks being seen on many occasions. Orioles are migratory in the southern part of their range within Australia, arriving in early Spring and departing in late Summer or early Autumn. Occasionally a few birds may over-winter in the southern regions but then they usually remain silent.

Orioles inhabit a wide variety of habitats, including broadleaf thickets and scrublands, dry sclerophyll forests, riparian woodlands, urban parklands and gardens, mangroves, paperbark woodlands, subtropical rainforests, temperate eucalypt forests and temperate rainforests, tropical eucalypt woodlands, tropical rainforests and wet sclerophyll forests. Figbirds occupy similar habitats but are more coastal or riparian by nature.

Nests are suspended, rough baggy cups of fibre in leafy branches. The oriole nest is beautifully constructed and suspended in the outer canopy of tall trees while the figbirds' nest, although similar, is often a messy arrangement in similar situations. The two or three eggs have a base colour of creamy buff to white and are spotted and blotched with dark brown or grey.

Diagnosis

'Differences in number of secondaries (often 11), in cranial proportions, and in the larger intra-nasal bone sheets and more massive ectethmoids of orioles, are partly bridged by the broad-headed figbirds, which share with cuckoo-shrikes [Campephagidae] consistently 10 secondaries, broad palatine shelves, rounded transpalatine processes and broadly truncated postorbital processes.'

Diagnosis References

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.

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