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Brown-backed Honeyeater | Ramsayornis modestus
Bruin-witte honingeter | Mielero modesto
The Brown-backed Honeyeater is one of the smallest honeyeaters of tropical Australia: barely twelve centimetres, brown above, white below with fine brown streaking across the breast, and with a striking pink-red bill. It works flowering melaleucas over water and builds a hanging domed nest of paperbark strips, often placed close to a wasp nest.
Voice
A rapid, dry 'mick, mick' repeated as it moves through the canopy, and beside it a chattering 'shee-shee' heard mostly when two birds meet. It is not a voice to admire — short, hard and businesslike — but in a flowering paperbark swamp it is one of the standing background sounds.
Recording: Bas van Balen — CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 · Amamapare, Freeport, Papua, Indonesia · xeno-canto
Identification
A very small, busy honeyeater of eleven to thirteen centimetres and eleven to fourteen grams. The upperparts are plain brown, the underparts white with narrow brown streaks running across the breast and flanks; throat and undertail coverts stay unmarked white. The bill is short, slightly curved and conspicuously pink-red to reddish — the main mark at range. A faint pale line runs over the eye with a dark eye-stripe beneath it. It moves fast and nervously, usually singly or in pairs, and hangs on the outermost flowers.
Confusion species
The real confusion species is the other Ramsayornis: Bar-breasted Honeyeater (Ramsayornis fasciatus) is slightly larger, with much crisper, more regular barring across breast and flanks instead of fine streaking, a scalloped crown and a dark bill with a pale base rather than a pink-red one. Both share the paperbark and mangrove swamps of northern Australia. It also overlaps with the Conopophila species: Rufous-throated Honeyeater (Conopophila rufogularis) and Rufous-banded Honeyeater (Conopophila albogularis) show a yellow-olive wing panel and unstreaked underparts, while Grey Honeyeater (Conopophila whitei) is a bird of the arid interior. Brown Honeyeater (Lichmera indistincta), finally, is plain brown without streaking and without a red bill.
Habitat
Almost always close to water in the tropical lowlands: melaleuca swamp forest, mangrove, open grassy woodland along creeks, rainforest edge and gardens as well. In the breeding season the nest stands over or beside water; it is a hanging dome of paperbark strips, and the birds like to nest in loose groups near a wasp or ant nest, which gives the nest protection from predators.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by main group and formation.
Range and movements
North-eastern Queensland, Cape York Peninsula, the Torres Strait islands and New Guinea. In Australia the species is partly resident and partly nomadic, but in north-eastern Queensland it behaves as a true migrant: birds shift south around August and back north in spring, with their presence tracking flowering and rainfall.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
In the dry season walk a creek lined with flowering paperbarks and watch the smallest, busiest birds in the outer branches. Once you have one, look first at the bill: pink-red makes it this species, dark with a pale base makes it Bar-breasted Honeyeater. The nest gives it away too — a hanging pouch of paperbark over the water, often with a wasp nest a hand's breadth away.
Conservation
Least Concern (LC). The species has a large range across northern Australia and New Guinea and is numerous in suitable swamp forest. Local threats lie in the loss or salinisation of melaleuca swamps and in altered water regimes on the northern floodplains, but there is no sign of a national decline.
Scientific name
Ramsayornis modestus | (Gray, 1858)
George Robert Gray described the species in 1858 as Glyciphila modesta, from birds of the Aru Islands; as it was later moved to another genus, author and year stand in parentheses. The genus Ramsayornis was erected in 1912 by Gregory Mathews and honours Edward Pierson Ramsay, the Australian ornithologist and long-serving curator of the Australian Museum; the suffix is Greek ornis 'bird'. modestus is Latin for 'modest, unassuming' — a fair description of the plumage. The English name Brown-backed Honeyeater and the Dutch name both name the colour contrast between upperparts and underparts.