Eclectus Parrot

The eclectus parrot is a stocky, short-tailed parrot about 35 cm long, native to the Maluku Islands. It is unusual among parrots for the sharp difference in color between the sexes: the male is mostly bright emerald green, while the female is mostly bright red with purple and blue. In the wild it eats mainly fruits, wild figs, unripe nuts, flower and leaf buds and some seeds. Large populations remain, and the birds are sometimes treated as pests for eating fruit from trees. It has an unusually long digestive tract, which allows it to tolerate a high-fiber diet.

About the eclectus parrot

The eclectus parrot is a stocky, short-tailed parrot from the rainforests of Indonesia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and northern Australia. Males are bright emerald green and females bright red, a color split so extreme that early European ornithologists thought the two sexes were different species. The name "eclectus parrot" covers every living member of the genus Eclectus.

The bird once treated as a single species, Eclectus roratus, has been divided. IUCN and BirdLife International split it first, and the IOC World Bird List followed in 2023, recognizing four living species: the Moluccan eclectus (E. roratus), the Papuan or red-sided eclectus (E. polychloros), the Sumba eclectus (E. cornelia) and the Tanimbar eclectus (E. riedeli). Under that scheme E. roratus is only the bird of the Maluku Islands, while the eclectus parrots of New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Cape York are subspecies of the Papuan eclectus. Among Moluccan eclectus subspecies, Vosmaer's eclectus is the one most often kept in aviculture.

The coloring is the eclectus parrot's signature. The male is mostly green with a yellowish tinge on the head, blue primary feathers, and red flanks and underwing coverts. His upper bill is orange at the base fading to yellow at the tip. The female of the grand eclectus, the nominate Moluccan subspecies, is mostly bright red, darker on the back and wings, with purple on the mantle and underwing and a mauve-blue wing edge. Her bill is all black. Adults of both sexes have yellow to orange eyes, while juveniles have dark brown to black eyes.

Eclectus parrots are the most sexually dimorphic of all parrots, and the arrangement is backward from most birds: here the female is the more brightly colored sex, a pattern called reverse sexual dichromatism. The male also carries ultraviolet coloration in his feathers. Females can see it; predators such as hawks and owls cannot. So the male looks brilliant to a potential mate while staying camouflaged in green leaves.

In captivity a blue color mutation has appeared, caused by a recessive gene. Blue males are light blue, while blue females are a mix of dark blue, white and grey. Chicks of all eclectus hatch with grey down, and their sex becomes obvious as soon as the first feathers grow in.

Behavior and diet

Eclectus parrots are diurnal, social, tree-dwelling birds that spend most of their day finding food, eating and resting. They form flocks to feed and breed, and flocking helps protect them when they are most exposed. Known predators include peregrine falcons and rufous owls. Faced with a rival, an eclectus parrot threatens by flashing an open beak, then "hides" the beak to back down.

They are loud birds. Calls range from high-pitched squawks to whistles and screeches, and in flight they repeat a harsh "krraach-krraak." Researchers have also described a chime-like call when a male returns to the nest with food.

In the wild they eat mostly fruit and fruit pulp, along with wild figs, unripe nuts, seeds, leaf buds, blossoms and nectar. The hooked upper bill cracks seeds and scoops pulp out of fruit. The digestive tract is built for this diet: the esophagus is wide and flexible, a stretchy glandular stomach can hold about as much as the crop, and the gut is unusually long, so the birds handle a high-fiber diet well. They can even make their own fat in the liver from the sugars in fruit pulp.

Breeding is where eclectus parrots stand apart. Good nest hollows in tall rainforest trees are scarce, so a female that finds one guards it fiercely, sometimes fighting other females to the death. She may stay at "her" tree for up to 11 months a year, and multiple males feed her by regurgitation. Up to five males may provision one female, and males have been recorded traveling 7.2 km (4.5 mi) to mate.

That system makes them unusual. Eclectus parrots are polyandrous and polygynandrous, meaning females mate with several males and males with several females. They practice cooperative polyandry, in which several males work together to help one female raise her chicks rather than competing, and they are the only parrot known to do this.

A clutch is two white eggs, about 40 by 31 mm (1.6 by 1.2 in), incubated for 28 to 30 days. Often only one chick fledges, at roughly 11 to 13 weeks. Females can bias the sex of their young, producing male chicks mainly when food is plentiful and a good hollow is secured. Both sexes usually mature at two to three years old.

Range and habitat

The Moluccan eclectus, E. roratus in the narrow sense, is native to the Maluku Islands of Indonesia. The genus as a whole lives in rainforest from New Guinea to the Solomon Islands and the tip of Australia's Cape York Peninsula, where birds are limited to rainforest patches in the Iron and McIlwraith ranges. Eclectus parrots probably reached Australia about 10,000 years ago across a land bridge from New Guinea; they do not fly far enough to cross the roughly 113 km (70 mi) of water that separates them today.

They prefer the forest canopy and dense tropical forest, often near water or the coast. Nest hollows sit high up, typically 20 to 30 m (66 to 98 ft) above the ground, because lower hollows flood easily in heavy rain. Fig, milkwood and black bean trees are common nest trees. Eclectus parrots have been introduced to Palau and Singapore, and they breed in the wild on the Hawaiian islands of Hawaii, Kauai and Oahu, where they can damage crops.

Male vs female eclectus parrot

Because the sexes look like different birds, people often mistake a pair for two species. The main differences:

Conservation status

The Moluccan eclectus is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (BirdLife International, 2019), and the other living eclectus species are also of least concern. Large populations remain, and in places the birds are treated as pests for eating fruit from trees. Some populations confined to small islands are comparatively rare, and the population is described as decreasing because of deforestation and habitat loss.

One relative is already gone. The oceanic eclectus, Eclectus infectus, lived in Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga and died out around 3,000 years ago after people settled those islands.