Emi Arnold

And then the first time I saw one, like,

oh this is one of the most spectacular birds I've ever seen in my life this is awesome and now I've been lucky enough to work in a bunch of different habitats now that I've seen one now I've seen you know like 50 because it's just you see that first one and just you learn a bit more about where they are and what to listen for and then you just notice them everywhere.

They're a little nuggety kind of finch.

Imagine like a normal house sparrow, but bright red beak and a little red patch right above its tail.

The deepest kind of blood red you can imagine.

And it kind of around the middle of its breast onto its wings is a black band.

And on the edge of its wings is just all these little white polka dots.

The rest of it's quite bland.

Like the majority of the wings are just a kind of dull brown and the head's gray.

the breast is kind of off-white but it's just the striking contrast of the red beak and the red tail with the black and white spots through the wing it's just so striking.

The males and females look exactly the same so you don't have to sit there and agonize over you know is it a female of this species or a female of the other species like you do with whistlers or some other birds it's just you see a diamond firetail and you know it's one or the other.

Yeah, I guess the main thing would be lots of big old trees, particularly with hollows in them.

I'm going to use the example of grey boxes or cypress pines.

They grow pretty slowly and hollows can take a good couple of hundred years to develop in those trees.

And that's true of most Australian trees, to be honest, but particularly in the kind of woodlands that I go birding in.

So I guess the presence of lots of

hollow bearing trees is the main thing because if you've got hollows you've got habitat for um any number of bird species as well as you know things like lace monitors and mammals but they're not as important as the birds and depending on like if it's a box iron bark or if it's a cypress pine um

box ironbark you might expect a bit more of a grassy understory than a shrubby understory so getting into that grassy eucalypt woodland kind of or grey box grassy woodland kind of ecological community so in those kinds of habitats I'm looking for it to be pretty open pretty grassy but lots of woody debris because that'll have habitat for stuff like brown tree creepers which I'm often looking for in habitat like that if it's a cypress kind of woodland

I'm generally looking for stuff like an understory, so any kinds of acacias or anything.

Again, lots of woody debris because that's handy for things like babblers to make their big ball nests out of.