Good morning, my lovelies.  This week’s bird was suggested by a PT-er whose name I cropped out of the screenshot I took of their suggestion.  If it was yours, please let me know so I can shower you with appropriate praise.  The eclectus parrot lives mostly in the canopys of rainforests in Australia and Papua New Guinea.  During my research this week I read that the live on a couple of islands that are about 70 miles apart, but the parrot isn’t a fan of flying such long distances at one stretch, and that the populations likely made it there 10,000 years ago, when a land bridge connected the two islands and they could cover the distance in smaller bursts.  The eclectus is notable for its extreme sexual dimorphism.  The males are green and orange while the females are deep red, purple and black.  This difference in coloration extends even to their beaks.  Eclectus is also “reverse dimorphic,” which means that the female is larger than the male.  Usually in cases of reverse sexual dimorphism, the females will take on the role of foraging for food, but the ecelctus females care for young while the males forage.  

Despite this “traditional” arrangement, the eclectus parrot is notably groovy when it comes to family structure.  From wikipedia: 

“Eclectus parrots are unusual among parrots because they exhibit both polyandrous mating (females mate with multiple males) and polygynandrous mating (males mate with multiple females and females mate with multiple males).^[3] Even more unusual, these birds exhibit a form of polyandry known as cooperative polyandry,^[14] in which multiple males breed with a single female, and all the males work together to help the female raise the chicks, rather than compete with each other. They are the only parrot known to do this.”  “Eclectus are also unusual in that they can bias the sex of their offspring, such that they can manipulate whether their offspring are male or female.^[15] It is thought that this behavior occurs as a result of the scarcity of their nesting hollows.^[12][3] As such, females will only have male offspring when resources are plentiful, a good nesting hollow is secured, and many males are around to feed her and her offspring.”

Eclectus parrots live in hollows in trees, and these hollows can be as many as six meters deep.  Because the best hollows are rare, females will rarely leave once they have picked one, spending up to 11 months at a time in their home.  They are also fiercely defended, and a female who has chosen a hollow will fight other intruding eclectus sometimes to the death to hold her spot.   Hollows are typically 20-60 meters above the forest floor, any closer to the ground and they run the risk of flooding.  

Their stunning plumage does of course serve a purpose.  The bright red females can be spotted by males or other females who would compete for their nesting place, letting one know “hey, baby” and the other to back off.  The dark colors of the female also allow it to hide more effectively by retreating into its dark burrow, where purple and red will look like black nothing.  The male green allows them to hide from predators by blending into the rainforest canopy where they live and forage, but it gets better.  The male has ultraviolet patterns in its plumage, lighting it up for the female eclectus to see while remaining inconspicuous to predators who cannot see the UV part of the spectrum.  
The eclectus parrot mostly feeds on fruit.  It eats intermittently, possibly because that is simply the nature of foraging, and has several physiological accommodations in the throat and gut that allow it to cram as much food as possible as quickly as possible when it gets the chance.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Links: https://tinyurl.com/23jajn5t, https://tinyurl.com/4e6b5km9, https://tinyurl.com/4uvjunv5, https://tinyurl.com/yj6d26hy, https://tinyurl.com/4edk76h8