The scarlet myzomela is a small passerine bird of the honeyeater family Meliphagidae native to Australia. It is sexually dimorphic; the male is a striking bright red with black wings, while the female is entirely brown. The species is found along most of the eastern coastline, from Cape York in the far north to Gippsland in Victoria.
About Scarlet myzomela in brief
The scarlet myzomela is a small passerine bird of the honeyeater family Meliphagidae native to Australia. It is sexually dimorphic; the male is a striking bright red with black wings, while the female is entirely brown. The species is found along most of the eastern coastline, from Cape York in the far north to Gippsland in Victoria. Its natural habitat is forest, where it forages mainly in the upper tree canopy. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed it as being of least concern on account of its large range and apparently stable population. There are no recognized subspecies nor regional variations; differences in observed plumage are due to wear after moulting. A 2004 genetic study of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA of honeyeaters found the scarletMyzomelsa to be most closely related to the cardinal myZomela, with their common ancestor diverging from that of the red-headed my Zomela around 2 million years ago. A 2017 genetic study using both nuclear and nuclear DNA suggests that the species diverged from the ancestor of the Banda Myzomelas around 2million years ago, but the relationships of many species within the genus are uncertain.
This species is commonly known as the Scarlet honeyeaters in Australia and scarlet Myzomeras in New Caledonia. The bird is a distinctive bird with a short tail and a relatively long down-curved bill and is between 9 and 11 centimetres long. The female lays two or rarely three flecked white eggs in a 5 centimetre diameter cup-shaped nest high in a tree. The scarletmyzomersa is one of the most common honeyeater species in Australia, along with the black-crested honeyeating and the white-crowned honey eater. It was depicted in three paintings in a set of early illustrations known as The Watling drawings, done in the first years of European settlement of Sydney between 1788 and 1794. In 1843 John Gould determined Latham’s three names to be the one species in 1843, adopting the first-written binomial name as the valid one and relegating the others to synonymy. Other common names are soldier-bird and blood-bird. An early colonial name was little soldier. Other common name is the red creeper, which persisted into the early 20th century.
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This page is based on the article Scarlet myzomela published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
