In appearance, Lichmera indistincta – the brown honeyeater – is a strong contender for an “undesirable” title: Australia’s most plain/drab/nondescript honeyeater.
This species’ song, however, is widely considered the finest of any Australian honeyeater’s; clear recordings of it are here. (the second grab is the better one)
The pictured brown honeyeaters are young individuals who dine on pollen & nectar from plants that naturally occur only in southwest Western Australia.
However, brown honeyeaters are highly adaptable; they live across parts of all mainland Australian states and territories, except Victoria;
They do not venture very far south.
North is another story; brown honeyeaters’ range reaches New Guinea and Indonesia.
Click here to discover more.
The Indonesian island of Bali has brown honeyeaters; Lichmera indistincta is the only honeyeater species found west of the Wallace Line, which delineates “Asian” and “Australian”/Australasian fauna.
As it happens, my beloved and I have recently returned from Indonesia.
Our two-stage trip’s first part was “east of the Wallace Line”, with a particular focus on the “forgotten” legacy of the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. (1823-1913)
Charles Darwin was not the sole “discoverer” of evolution by natural selection.
Wallace also “discovered” it, independently of Darwin, and in at least one crucial aspect Wallace had the more accurate grasp of exactly how natural selection happens.
Next on Pelican Yoga: a series of single-image, Indonesian “teasers”.
The series will begin “east of Wallace”, in an archipelago that (long before Wallace) once enjoyed a global monopoly on something edible, aromatic and highly prized – a commodity which at that time was more precious than gold!
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