# Striated Pardalote

*Pardalotus striatus*

Despite being tree-dwelling birds, they often nest underground, excavation-style, digging horizontal tunnels up to a meter long into earth banks.

- **Taxonomy:** Animalia › Chordata › Aves › Passeriformes › Pardalotidae › Pardalotus
- **IUCN Red List status:** Least Concern
- **Population trend:** stable
- **Biome:** forest
- **Habitat:** Eucalypt forests, woodlands, and paperbark forests, occasionally visiting urban parks and gardens.
- **Diet:** Primarily foliage-dwelling insects, especially psyllids and their sugary, protective secretions known as lerps.
- **Range:** Australia
- **Size:** 9 to 11 cm in length, weighing approximately 10 to 14 grams
- **Lifespan:** 4 to 6 years
- **Active:** diurnal
- **Threats:** Habitat fragmentation, loss of mature trees containing nesting hollows, and competition for nest sites with larger introduced species.
- **Safe to approach?:** Completely harmless. These birds are active and busy, best observed with binoculars high in the branches. If you find a nesting tunnel in a clay bank, maintain a respectful distance of at least 10 meters to avoid causing the parents to abandon their clutch.

## About

The striated pardalote ( Pardalotus striatus ) is the least colourful and most common of the four pardalote species. Other common names include pickwick , wittachew and chip-chip . It is a very small, short-tailed bird that is more often heard than seen, foraging noisily for lerps and other small creatures in the treetops.

## Sources

- Plate: https://gaia-dex.com/species/0684c955-6b27-4701-a658-7f9768bfa551
- iNaturalist: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/13532
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardalotus striatus
- Conservation status: IUCN Red List category, as recorded by Gaia-Dex
- Photo: https://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/423188299/medium.jpeg (Lucas Christofides, CC-BY, via iNaturalist)

Habitat, diet, size and similar notes are AI-written summaries; check them against the linked sources before relying on them.