Check Out The Rose Robin – A Small Bird With A Big Heart

This little bird can’t stay in one place for more than a couple of seconds.

Damjan

• Published in Animal Stories
• November 8, 2021

The rose robin (Petroica rosea) is a small passerine bird with a relatively long tail. Passerine birds are sparrow-shaped birds with distinctive toe arrangement -three pointing forward and one back.

It is sexually dimorphic. Males have a dark grey back and have a white patch above the bill with a bright rose-pink chest.

The abdomen and outer tail feathers are white. The wings and upper tail are a dark-grayish.

Females are mostly a shade of brown-gray, with a small white patch on the chest. The outer feathers are white and off-white.

Females can sometimes have a pale pink wash on across the chest. Rose robin young ones tend to resemble the female.

These birds mainly inhabit areas in eastern and southeastern Australia. They like wet sclerophyll forests and rainforest areas.

They prefer gullies and valleys, migrating into the drier forest when the temperature drops. Rose Robins mostly feed on caterpillars, wasps, weevils, spiders, and other insects they find in tree canopies.

However, they also occasionally catch insects on the wing. They breed between September to January when they build a neat, cup-shaped nest from moss and ferns.

They use spider webs, feathers, and fur to bind and will the nest. The exterior is coated with lichen.

The nests are generally located around 33-66 feet above the ground, and the female lays two or three eggs. The female incubates the eggs and both sexes feed the young.

The rose robin is a small (4.3 inches) passerine bird with a relatively long tail

It is sexually dimorphic. Females are mostly a shade of brown-gray

Adult birds are around 4.3 inches in length. When foraging, Rose Robins seldom stay still, darting out from a perch in pursuit of flying insects with an aerobatic, tumbling flight or snatching insects from the foliage.

Even when perched, they constantly shift position or change perches by making short flights every few seconds. They often join mixed-species feeding flocks, accompanying thornbills, fantails, and other small insectivorous species.

These birds mainly inhabit areas in eastern and southeastern Australia

Rose Robins mostly feed on insects they find in tree canopies

It is easy to confuse Rose Robin with the other red robins that share its wet forest habitat, with the young birds and females being the hardest to distinguish. In general, it tends to be slimmer with a much longer tail and shorter legs.

It can be distinguished from the somewhat similar Pink Robin by the following: the male not as black, and the pink only on the chest (it extends further down abdomen for Pink Robin), while the female is more grey than brown; the Pink Robin also has no white feathers in the tail.

Flame Robins are generally bigger and bulkier, with males having a distinctive white wing bar not seen in the Rose Robin.

They breed between September to January

The species is reported to be locally quite common

Rose Robins seldom stay still

Even when perched, they constantly shift position every few seconds

Watch them on video:

Red Robin has an extensive breeding range and, although the population size has not been calculated, the species is reported to be locally quite common. Sometimes, they are hard to notice because they fly very quickly and don’t stay on one branch for too long.

H/T: OneBirdCage

Damjan