Papuan Black Myzomela

The Papuan Black Myzomela is a small, restless honeyeater found across New Guinea and many of its satellite islands. Adult males are almost entirely glossy lacquer-black, an unusually plain but striking wardrobe in a genus better known for flashes of scarlet and crimson. Females and young birds are drabber, wearing sooty brown tones with a wash of dull red about the face and throat. The species belongs to Myzomela, a group of tiny nectar specialists that reach their greatest diversity across the islands of the tropical Pacific and Australasia.

For all its wide range, this is a bird most people meet by chance rather than by searching. It lives high in the canopy and at forest edges, and it announces itself less by appearance than by constant motion. When a flowering tree comes into bloom, Papuan Black Myzomelas gather to feed, chase, and squabble among the blossoms, and a patient observer scanning the treetops with binoculars will often pick out several jostling for the richest sprays of flowers.

This is a very small honeyeater with a fine, slightly downcurved bill built for probing flowers. The male is the easy one: an entirely glossy black bird, roughly sparrow-sized or smaller, with paler underwing coverts that flash in flight. Females and immatures are far less distinctive, and separating them from other small dark honeyeaters in the region takes care. Across the broad range there is geographic variation, and in some island populations females can look much darker than the typical brown-and-red bird.

Male vs. female

The sexes differ enough that a good look usually settles which is which. The male is uniformly glossy black from bill to tail, catching the light with a faint sheen and showing paler feathering under the wing when it moves. The female is much plainer, a sooty grey-brown bird warmed by a patch of dull red on the forehead and throat, the last echo of the bright colors worn by males in some related myzomelas. This kind of strong difference between a black male and a brown-and-red female is a recurring pattern across the genus. Because plumage varies from island to island, birders working the fringes of the range are wise to note exactly where a bird was seen rather than assuming every dark individual is a male.

Juveniles

Young Papuan Black Myzomelas most closely resemble dull females, wearing muted grey-brown plumage without the male's gloss and often with the reddish facial tones reduced or absent. As with many honeyeaters, immature males can be confusing during the transition to adult dress, showing a patchy mix of brown and incoming black feathers before they reach the clean, glossy plumage of a mature male. The finer points of how young birds molt and how long the transition takes are not thoroughly documented for this species.

Like other myzomelas, the Papuan Black Myzomela is a high-voiced bird. Its vocalizations are thin, tinkling, and squeaky, often delivered as rapid twittering phrases from a perch or given in snatches while the bird forages among blossoms. The notes are easy to lose in the general din of a busy flowering tree, but once learned they are a reliable clue that the species is present overhead. As with much of its life history, its full vocal range has not been described in the detail lavished on temperate songbirds, and careful sound recording across the range would likely reveal more variation than is currently on record.

The Papuan Black Myzomela ranges widely through the New Guinea region. It occurs across mainland New Guinea, in both Indonesian Papua to the west and Papua New Guinea to the east, and extends onto numerous offshore and satellite islands, including islands in the Bismarck Archipelago area. Several subspecies have been described from different parts of this island-studded range, reflecting the way honeyeaters diversify as populations become isolated on separate landmasses.

Its preferred habitats are subtropical and tropical moist lowland forest, forest edge, and savanna woodland, and it takes readily to secondary growth, plantations, and gardens wherever flowering trees are on offer. This is primarily a bird of the lowlands and hills rather than the high mountains, where it gives way to other, more montane myzomelas. Because it tolerates disturbed and human-modified habitat, it remains common and is classed as Least Concern across its broad range.

Nectar is the heart of this bird's diet. The Papuan Black Myzomela is strongly tied to flowering trees, and its fine, brush-tipped tongue and slender decurved bill are tools for drawing sugar from blossoms. It is frequently recorded at the flowers of albizias, eucalypts, and other canopy trees, and where several such trees bloom at once the birds may concentrate in numbers, defending favored sprays of flowers from rivals.

Nectar alone cannot supply everything a bird needs, so the species also takes small insects and other arthropods for protein. It gleans these from foliage and flowers and snatches them in short aerial sallies, a mixed foraging style shared by many honeyeaters. In doing so it also functions as a pollinator, carrying pollen between the flowers it visits as it moves through the canopy.

The breeding biology of the Papuan Black Myzomela is poorly documented, a common situation for small tropical forest birds that spend most of their lives high in the canopy. What is known or inferred comes largely from the habits of its close relatives. Myzomelas typically build a small, neat, cup-shaped nest of fine plant fibers bound together with spider web and slung in the outer foliage of a tree or shrub, where the delicate structure is hard for predators to reach.

Clutches in this genus usually number around two eggs, and that appears to hold for this species, but the details of the incubation period, nestling period, and how the sexes share parental duties have not been well described for the Papuan Black Myzomela specifically. Careful nest studies in New Guinea would help fill one of the clearer gaps in its natural history.

This is not a backyard bird for most readers, so the practical question is less how to attract one and more where and how to see one. It is a widespread and reasonably common resident of the New Guinea lowlands, and a birder in the right habitat has a good chance of finding it with a little patience and a scan of the flowering canopy.

• Focus on lowland and hill forest edges in New Guinea, in both Papua New Guinea and Indonesian Papua, rather than the high mountains where other myzomelas replace it.
• Look for trees in bloom, especially flowering albizias, eucalypts, and other canopy species, which draw myzomelas in to feed and are the single best place to search.
• Scan the treetops and forest edge with binoculars for small, dark, fast-moving birds chasing one another among the blossoms.
• Learn the thin, squeaky twittering calls, which often reveal the birds before you spot them high in the canopy.
• Try gardens, plantations, and secondary growth near forest, since the species tolerates human-modified habitat where flowering trees are present.
• Go with a local guide familiar with New Guinea birds, who will know which trees are flowering and where honeyeaters are concentrating that season.

• Red-collared Myzomela: A mountain myzomela with bold red and black plumage in males, found at higher elevations in New Guinea where the Papuan Black rarely occurs.
• Dusky Myzomela: A plain sooty-brown myzomela of coastal and island forests, lacking the glossy black plumage of the Papuan Black male.