Australasia's nectar birds are not sunbirds
Meliphagidae packs about 195 species in 51 genera across Australia, New Guinea, Wallacea, and Pacific islands east to Samoa and Tonga. They look like Old World sunbirds yet evolved the nectar habit separately, and many Australian flowering plants depend on them for pollination.
Roughly half the family's species are native to Australia, with many of the rest in New Guinea; Bali holds a single species west of the Wallace Line. Together with fairy-wrens, pardalotes, and thornbills they form Meliphagoidea, an early branch of oscine songbirds. Genera include chats, myzomelas, friarbirds, wattlebirds, miners, and melidectes. Resemblance to sunbirds and flowerpeckers is convergent evolution, not close kinship.
Many species carry a brush-tipped tongue that soaks nectar; the bird flicks it into flowers and squeezes liquid out when the bill closes. They usually hop through outer foliage rather than hover like hummingbirds, though smaller members can hover briefly. Almost all also take insects by hawking or gleaning, and some larger birds such as the white-eared and Tasmania's strong-billed honeyeaters probe under bark. Long fine bills track more nectarivory; short bills less so, yet even spinebills add insects when breeding for protein.
Proteaceae, Myrtaceae, and Ericaceae across Australasia are heavily pollinated by honeyeaters; New Zealand's Anthornis is likewise important. Movements are poorly mapped: many track flowering plants, arid-zone species wander farther, and only a few are clearly migratory. Taxonomy keeps shifting—golden and Bonin honeyeaters moved to white-eyes, the stitchbird to its own family, MacGregor's honeyeater reclaimed from birds-of-paradise, and Hawaiian Moho and Chaetoptila placed in Mohoidae after a 2008 museum-genetics study. The wattled smoky honeyeater was described in 2007 from Papua's Foja Mountains after a December 2005 discovery.
Source: Honeyeater
