Sunbirds | Nectariniidae

Honingzuigers | Suimangas

Small, sharp-featured birds with a thin curved bill and a tongue rolled into a tube at the tip and frayed at the very end, used to draw nectar from a flower as through a straw. Where the corolla tube is too long the base of the flower is pierced from outside, so that the nectar is taken without the bird acting as pollinator. Unlike the hummingbirds they resemble but are not related to, they almost always drink perched, clinging to the flower stem and hovering for at most a second. The glossy blue, green and purple of the males is not pigment but structural colour — layers within the feather that split the light, so that a turning bird flips from black to metal; bright pectoral tufts sit at each side of the breast and are flicked out only in display or threat. Several species wear a dull, female-like plumage outside the breeding season, and in a number of them the male carries two elongated central tail feathers. The nest is a hanging purse of plant fibre and spider silk with a side entrance and a porch, built by the female alone and in many species plastered outside with caterpillar webbing, plant down and lichen; the clutch is regularly parasitised by cuckoos of the genus Chrysococcyx. Distribution follows the flowering: from the aloes and ericas of the winter-rainfall country to the flowering trees of miombo and coastal forest, where the birds defend a territory around the richest flowering shrub throughout the day.