Shrike-tits are sassy little insectivorous songbirds with striking colours, a bulky-looking head with a punky mohawk and a distinctly powerful bill. Like most Australian birds, the shrike-tit was incorrectly named after more familiar northern hemisphere birds (because it has a shrike-like bill and a tit-like body form and coloration…yeah yeah…have a giggle!).
It was simply inconceivable to early British and American ornithologists like the great birdman John Gould, that our songbirds could have evolved prior to those of the motherland (where all things good surely originate?). Colonialist thinking didn’t allow such ridiculous (but correct) perspectives to exist until the 1990’s, when arrogant northerners finally accepted that Australian songbirds like the shrike-tit are in fact the Earth’s original songbirds and thus not at all closely related to songbirds of the north.
The territorial call recorded here is from a male bird in the upper Bellinger Valley as he patrolled the perimeter of his mighty kingdom.