Flowerpeckers: Family Dicaeidae

Flowerpeckers are a family of small, stout passerines native to the forests and scrublands of Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Australia. These birds generally have long, thick, and slightly curved beaks, and a short, fat body. The females of this family are fairly drab in color while the males are brighter in color. This is called sexual dimorphism, where both sexes look very different from each other. Flowerpeckers use their long beak to eat both nectar from flowers (Flowerpeckers, duh...), and fruit. Like their close relatives, the Sunbirds, Flowerpeckers build tight, purse-shaped nests that hang from tree branches.

Poison-peckers

Some species of Flowerpeckers specialize in eating mistletoe berries. If you ever get fresh mistletoe to hang up during the holidays, you may be forewarned not to eat the berries, because they are poisonous. Flowerpeckers have evolved strategies to cope with this poison and are able to digest the berries.

One reason that plants even produce fruit is to distribute their seeds. When animals eat fruit, the seeds are normally left unharmed and are deposited elsewhere in a nice pile of fertilizer. This is an excellent example of interdependency between organisms. The plant is able to reproduce efficiently and the bird gets nutrients. The Flowerpecker's ability to digest the toxins in mistletoe help the plant immensely to distribute its seeds. Ornithologists that study these birds have worked on studying this relationship between Mistletoe and Flowerpeckers and have found some interesting results. They found that species that eat mistletoe berries digest them very fast to minimize exposure to the toxins (Berries stay in the digestive tract for 83 seconds on average). Because they are able to digest them quickly, researchers found the mistletoe seeds had a much better chance of producing healthy seedlings than those seeds ingested by other birds.

Taxonomy and Evolution

Flowerpeckers are a sister clade, meaning very closely related, to Sunbirds and Spiderhunters. The family contains only two genera and differ based on the amount of primary flight feathers on each wing. Genera include:

Genus Prionochilus
Genus Dicaeum