Spotted Pardalote

Fascinating facts about the Spotted Pardalote

• One of Australia's smallest birds, barely eight centimetres and lighter than a two-dollar coin, yet it digs. A pair tunnels into an earth bank, a road cutting or a riverside slope, driving a burrow up to a metre long and ending in a domed chamber of bark.
• It is called the diamondbird for good reason. The crown is black scattered with white spots, the rump burns rust-red, the throat is deep yellow, and none of it is visible from the ground, because the bird spends its days in the canopy far overhead.
• It lives on lerp, the sugary crystalline shelter that psyllid insects build over themselves on eucalypt leaves. The pardalote takes both roof and occupant, and in doing so keeps the trees from being overwhelmed by the insects.
• The call gives it away long before the bird does. A soft, patient three-note sleep-may-bee repeated from high in the leaves, so unhurried and so easy to overlook that most people who hear it never realise a bird is there at all.
• Nesting underground is safer from weather but not from everything. Foxes and cats dig the tunnels out, and pairs sometimes lose several attempts in a season before one succeeds.

At a glance

About the Spotted Pardalote

A tiny, jewel-marked bird of Australian eucalypt forest, spotted white on black above with a rust-red rump and a yellow throat. It feeds high in the canopy on lerp, and nests in a burrow it digs itself into an earth bank, which is an odd habit for a bird that otherwise almost never comes down. Heard far more often than seen.

Spotted Pardalote photographed on Feravox

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