Satin Bowerbird

Appearance

Mature males have clear blue eyes and are uniformly coloured black, however, light diffraction by the surface texture of the feathers results in an almost metallic sheen giving a deep shiny blue appearance. Immature males are coloured and marked the same as females and are often mistaken for them.

Females might be mistaken for the Green Catbird or Spotted Catbird with distinctively green/brown or otherwise entirely brown upper body and lighter under body with a distinct reticulated or scalloped pattern, but with very striking lilac eyes.

Distribution

The Satin Bowerbird is common in rainforest and tall wet sclerophyll forest in eastern Australia from southern Queensland to Victoria. There is also an isolated population in the Wet Tropics of north Queensland.

Behavior

Satin Bowerbirds nest between October and February. Typically two eggs but occasionally one or three are laid in a shallow nest of twigs on top of which are placed leaves of "Eucalyptus" or "Acacia".

These leaves turn brown as the eggs are laid, and may serve as camouflage. The eggs are cream but streaked with brown, and are much larger than typical for a bird of its size at around 19 grams; they are laid every other day and hatch asynchronously after 21 days of incubation.

The young are able to fly three weeks after hatching, but remain dependent on the female for another two months, finally dispersing at the beginning of the southern winter.

Female Satin Bowerbirds mature at two to three years but males do not reach maturity until seven or eight years when they have moulted completely into their characteristic blue-black adult plumage. The Satin Bowerbird is the longest-lived passerine with anything approaching high-quality banding data: it is estimated that the average lifespan of the species is around eight or nine years, whilst the record longevity in the wild of twenty-six years is the greatest for any banded passerine.

Food

Like all Ptilonorhynchidae, Satin Bowerbirds are predominantly frugivorous as adults, though they also eat leaves and a small amount of seeds and insects. As nestlings, however, they are largely fed on beetles, grasshoppers and cicadas until they can fly.

Satin Bowerbirds are not in the least finicky in their food preferences, and have taken extremely readily to the numerous plants introduced since European settlement.

Indeed, they are a major dispersal agent for a number of weedy plants, such as camphor laurel, the European olive and various species of privet. They are also often persecuted by horticulturalists because they frequently raid fruit and vegetable crops. Satin Bowerbirds are aggressive when foraging, frequently attempting to displace other birds from fruit trees.