Out on a Limb: Showy Mistletoes and Sticky Bottoms
A plant and bird come to an arrangement and everyone wins
Name: Showy Mistletoe
Location: Australia
Relationship: It’s complicated.
As wildlife spectacles go, the dance of the Mistletoebird is at the modest end of the scale. It is an intimate moment between bird, bottom, and branch. But the world is made up of intimate moments, and one after another they lead to other things.
The Mistletoebird is a flowerpecker, the only Australian member of family Dicaeidae. Like other flowerpeckers, it feeds on berries, especially those of the showy mistletoes (family Loranthaceae), which are named for their brightly coloured blooms. Although other birds eat mistletoe berries — the Eurasian Mistle Thrush, for example— the anatomy and behaviour of the Mistletoebird and its relatives are uniquely tied to the plant’s lifecycle.
Working its way through a clump of mistletoe, the bird squeezes the berries with its beak, popping out the flesh from the tough skin. Within half an hour of swallowing the fruit — and sometimes in as little as ten minutes…
