Their preferred habitats are heathland, open woodland and riverine forest so they don’t occur in the rainforest at Iron Range. A usually reliable site for them is the heathland at Tozer’s Gap on the way in but this time an orange grevillea was flowering everywhere in abundance, so the birds could have been anywhere. Happily, I caught up with some friends of mine who had just seen the honeyeater in paperbarks and bottlebrushes at the Wenlock River crossing on the same road. This is a 4 or 5 hour round trip from Iron Range, so I decided to risk waiting until my final departure and then I stopped for lunch at the crossing.

When I got there, the paperbarks had finished flowering but the bottlebrushes were still putting on a fine display. Even so, it took some diligent searching before I finally found a couple of White-streaked among the commoner Honeyeaters, mainly Dusky and Graceful. They seemed shy and preferred to remain hidden in the foliage, so I sat on a sandy bank in the river until they showed themselves. They are unusual honeyeaters with no close relatives and the sole member of the genus Trichodere (a ‘monotypic’ genus). ‘Trich’ comes from the Greek word for ‘hair’ and refers, as does ‘white-streaked’ to the bristle-like feathers on the breast (cf Trichoglossus – ‘hairy tongue’ – referring to the brush-like, nectar-licking tongues of Rainbow Lorikeets). Adults have yellow lines below the eye, a yellow ear tuft and a blue gape (photos 1 and 2). They also have yellow wings and tail: easier to see in the third photo of a juvenile which lacks the blue gape and has only a single yellow feather on the head but is beginning to develop the bristle-like breast feathers, also characteristic of adults.

In the second photo, the nest-like material below the bird is flood debris – a clear reminder that this part of the Cape York Peninsula is accessible by road only in the dry-season. The photo below shows the crossing at Wenlock River.