Parrotbills and allies | Paradoxornithidae

Diksnavelmezen | Picoloros

The bill is short, deep and strongly arched, with a curved upper edge, built to crack hard seeds and to prise insects out of stems. Also striking are a long graduated tail often held cocked, short rounded wings and loose, fluffy plumage. These are birds of dense low scrub that seldom venture far from cover and fly poorly; in this region one species lives in the dry, springy brush of the western coastal hills. They are markedly sedentary: a pair stays together the whole year and often for life in the same territory, roosts side by side and moves so little that many birds spend their entire lives within a few hundred metres of where they hatched. The song is a series of clear notes that speeds up and runs into a rattle, like a bouncing ball; it is heard all year, and the bird is almost always heard before it is seen.