The red-backed fairywren is a passerine bird in the Australasian wren family, Maluridae. It is endemic to Australia and can be found near rivers and coastal areas along the northern and eastern coastlines. The male adopts a striking breeding plumage, with a black head, upperparts and tail, and a brightly coloured red back and brown wings. The female has brownish upper parts and paler underparts and resembles the female in eclipse plumage.
About Red-backed fairywren in brief
The red-backed fairywren is a passerine bird in the Australasian wren family, Maluridae. It is endemic to Australia and can be found near rivers and coastal areas along the northern and eastern coastlines. The male adopts a striking breeding plumage, with a black head, upperparts and tail, and a brightly coloured red back and brown wings. Two subspecies are recognised; the nominate M. m. melanocephalus of eastern Australia has a longer tail and orange back, and the short-tailed M. m. cruentatus from northern Australia. The preferred habitat is heathland and savannah, particularly where low shrubs and tall grasses provide cover. It can be nomadic in areas where there are frequent bushfires, although pairs or small groups of birds maintain and defend territories year-round in other parts of its range. As part of a courtship display, the male wren plucks red petals from flowers and displays them to females. It was previously classified as a member of the old world flycatcher family, Muscicapidae, and later as a members of the warbler family, Sylviidae. In 1975 it was placed in the newly recognised Australasians wrenFamily,Maluridae, before being reclassified in 1975 as a species of the genus Malurus. The species is closely related to both the Australian white-winged fairy Wren and the white-shouldered fairyWren of New Guinea.
Termed the bicoloured wrens by ornithologist Richard Schodde, these three species are notable for their lack of headfts, ear tufts, black or blue plumage with contrasting shoulder and wing colour. They replace each other across northern Australia and New Guinea and geographically geographically across other Australia and Papua New Guinea; they are the first to classify the three forms as one species, although Richard Schaddeclassified pyrrhonotus as a broad hybrid from a broad zone in North Queensland; this area is bounded by the Burdekin, Endeavour and Norman Rivers regions. The red- backed fairywRen is sexually promiscuous, and each partner may mate with other individuals and even assist in raising the young from such pairings. The female has brownish upper parts and paler underparts and resembles the female in eclipse plumage and the juvenile resemble the female. It mainly eats insects, and supplements its diet with seed and small fruit. Like other fairyw Rens, it is unrelated to the true wrenfamily, Troglodytidae, and is related to the Meliphagidae and the Pardalotidae within the large superfamily Meliphagoidea. It has been named after John Latham, who described it as the black-headed fly catcher in 1801. The specific epithet derived from the Ancient Greek melas, melas ‘black’ and kephalē ‘head’
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This page is based on the article Red-backed fairywren published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 14, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
