The rainbow lorikeet is a beautiful bird in the parrot family that in Canada you would expect to see only in a cage, of course. My first encounter with them in Australia was in a cage, in fact. When we first came here in late December (2017), we got to look after the menagerie of my hosts here at Charles Sturt University, Leslie and Paul Weston. At that time, they had a pair of rainbow lorikeets with a baby in the nest box.
While Leslie and Paul were away on vacation, and I was feeding and looking after the lorikeets, the baby rainbow lorikeet emerged into the sunlight and gradually found his mobility. It was a joy to see – although occasionally the Weston’s dachshunds got a little too excited about the little guy, and I had to tell them to stay away from the cage.
Last week on our trip to Brisbane, we got to see rainbow lorikeets in the wild at the home of my former student, Carla Sbrocci just north of Sydney (see below for the photo of a wild rainbow lorikeet). So obviously in this country, parrots are not limited to cages, and these rainbow lorikeets are distributed all over eastern Australia. In fact, they are invading new areas where they weren’t found before like western Australia near Perth and Tasmania, thanks to human transport.
Before we got to Carla’s place, I had actually seen semi-wild rainbow lorikeets at the Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane. They inhabit the “kangaroo feeding” area of the sanctuary where you can go and feed and interact with kangaroos, and also Australia’s “big bird” – the emu.
However, one of the most interesting interactions I witnessed was the emu sticking its head in the rainbow lorikeet’s house to steal their food. As you’ll see in the video, the lorikeets didn’t seem too alarmed – it probably happens all the time! But it was a good picture of just how big these emus are.
So far Deb and I have only seen emus wild once – four of them on the Newell Highway that we took north to Brisbane, in a section of the highway where there was a recent bushfire. We wondered if the fire had something to do with the emus being at the roadside, but alas I didn’t stop to take pictures. Hopefully I’ll be able to feature emus again if we can actually get some photos of wild ones, but in the meantime, enjoy this thieving emu as a bonus to this week’s bird of the week!
