Spotted pardalote
| Spotted pardalote | |
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| Male with nesting material, Tasmania | |
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| Female with nesting material, Tasmania | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Aves |
| Order: | Passeriformes |
| Family: | Pardalotidae |
| Genus: | Pardalotus |
| Species: | P. punctatus |
| Binomial name | |
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Pardalotus punctatus (Shaw & Nodder, 1792) |
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| Approximate distribution | |
The spotted pardalote (Pardalotus punctatus) is one of the smallest of all Australian birds at 8 to 10 centimetres (3.1 to 3.9 in) in length, and one of the most colourful; it is sometimes known as the diamondbird. Although moderately common in all of the reasonably fertile parts of Australia (the east coast, the south-east, and the south-west corner) it is seldom seen closely enough to enable identification.
Three subspecies are recognised. The wet tropics spotted pardalote (subspecies militaris) is found in northeastern Queensland, while the distinctive subspecies, the yellow-rumped pardalote (subspecies xanthopyge), is found in drier inland regions of southern Australia, particularly in semi-arid Mallee woodlands.
The spotted pardalote was described by English naturalist George Shaw and drawn by Frederick Polydore Nodder in the 1792 work The Naturalist's Miscellany: Or, Coloured Figures Of Natural Objects; Drawn and Described Immediately From Nature. Calling it Pipra punctata, or speckled manakin, Shaw conceded that nothing had been reported of its habits in New Holland (Australia). Early settlers of New South Wales knew it as the Diamond Bird, on account of the spots on its plumage, and John Gould called it the spotted diamond-bird. Other early names include diamond sparrow, bank diamond and diamond dyke, the last two relating to its nest burrows in riverbanks. Indigenous people from lowlands and Perth districts of southern Western Australia knew it as widopwidop and bilyabit, though the terms were also used for the striated pardalote.Headache bird is a colloquial name given it because of the repetitive "sleep-may-be" call uttered in the breeding season.
The species was placed in the new genus Pardalotus by Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot in 1816, who also coined the word "pardalote". Within the genus, its closest relative is the forty-spotted pardalote (Pardalotus quadragintus) based on size and plumage similarities.
Three subspecies are recognised. The nominate subspecies (P. punctatus punctatus) is found from southeastern Queensland through eastern New South Wales, eastern and southern Victoria and into southeastern South Australia, as well as southwestern Western Australia. It is also found across eastern and northwestern Tasmania.
The yellow-rumped pardalote (P. punctatus xanthopyge) was considered for many years to be a separate species native to dryer inland southern Australia. It was described in 1867 amid some controversy. Amateur ornithologist Edward Pierson Ramsay, then 24 years old, recorded that a specimen at the Australian Museum that had been collected by John Leadbeater near the Murray River differed in its plumage from the typical spotted pardalote. The director of the museum, Gerard Krefft, lent the specimen to Ramsay to describe, which he did as Pardalotus chrysoprymnus in a manuscript on 10 December 1866. Krefft advised him that Leadbeater was pushing for the species to be named after him, hence the paper was read but not published in London at a meeting of the Zoological Society of London on 28 February 1867. Meanwhile, Professor Frederick McCoy of the National Museum of Natural History and Geology in Melbourne also published a description of the species from a specimen collected near Swan Hill, in The Australasian newspaper on 29 December 1866, which was formally described on 1 March 1867. McCoy named it Pardalotus xanthopygus, or yellow-backed diamondbird. Ramsay suspected that discussion of his description prompted McCoy to publish his own description, however McCoy countered that they had been aware it was a separate species for some time. In any case, McCoy's description stood and Ramsay's was consigned to synonymy.
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