Rainbow locker
| Rainbow locker | ||||||||||||
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Rainbow spint in flight |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Merops ornatus | ||||||||||||
| Latham , 1801 |
The rainbow spint ( Merops ornatus ) is a bird of the genus ( Merops ) and family of the bee-eater (Meropidae). It occurs naturally in Australia , Indonesia , East Timor , the Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea .
The rainbow spider man is 22 to 25 cm tall, of which the tail alone measures 2 to 6 cm, and weighs around 30 grams. The female is slightly smaller and lighter, and the tail of the female is only 1 to 2 cm long.
The rainbow spider is primarily green and blue with a black stripe over the eyes, a green throat, a black tail, and a black beak. Males and females have no significant dimorphism .
It feeds on hymenoptera , which it can see sitting on a branch from a distance of up to 50 m. After the immediate hunt, he removes the sting of poisonous prey with great skill. A rainbow spint eats several hundred insects a day, the indigestible parts of which it chokes out again as bulges.
Presumably the rainbow spint reaches sexual maturity at the end of the 1st year of life. The mating and breeding season is from August to January. It breeds in smaller, loose colonies, where young birds from the last brood often help with the rearing of the next brood.
literature
- Fascination with animals and nature. Meister Verlag GmbH, Munich, group 2, map 9.
Web links
- Merops ornatus inthe IUCN 2013 Red List of Threatened Species . Listed by: BirdLife International, 2012. Retrieved February 6, 2014.