Machaerirhynchidae – Boatbills

Machaerirhynchidae is a family of passerines with affinities to the woodswallows and butcherbirds. They inhabitant the wet forests of Queensland, in northern Australia and New Guinea that move through the forest where they glean insects from the air and from leaves as they go.

They are mostly yellow with large heads, a horizontal stance, and a habit of cocking up their tail over their back most of the time, they bear a remarkable evolutionary convergence, both in their form and their behaviour to the tody-flycatchers of the New World. They are unrelated and are more closely related to a clade of birds that are mostly much larger and less agile.

Black-breasted Boatbill Machaerirhynchus nigripectus – ©Dubi Shapiro

The Black-breasted Boatbill is found in New Guinea. Its natural habitat is subtropical or tropical moist montane forests and does not migrate. It is most commonly seen alone, but sometimes in pairs or mixed-species flocks. Its calls are a rising series of forceful, but slightly wheezy, whistles. The phrases are interspersed with harsh ‘jak-jak-jak’ notes. It is a fairly small, broad-billed bird with yellow underparts and face with large black chest patch, black upperparts with white wing and undertail markings. It is similar to the Yellow-breasted Boatbill, but the latter is found at lower elevations and lacks the black breast spot.

Yellow--breasted Boatbill Machaerirhynchus flaviventer – ©Greg Miles CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The Yellow–breasted Boatbill is a small bird with an extremely wide and flat beak. Its underparts are bright yellow, and its upperparts olive in females and black in males, with clear white wing-bars, a white throat, and yellowish ‘eyebrow’. It has a long, rounded tail that is often cocked up. The juveniles lack the white throat patch and have a stubbier tail. It is found in rainforest habitats across the New Guinea mainland and islands and in Queensland, Australia’s wet forest, where it tends to forage in the canopy.