Are you over the Rainbow?

Each October, thousands of Australians participate in Birdlife Australia‘s Great Aussie Birdcount, and each year since it began in 2014, the most commonly reported bird is the Rainbow Lorikeet. Trichoglossus moluccanus is a stunningly beautiful parrot, loud, bold, and easily tamed to come for regular feeding by homeowners. Colourful, small flocks of them streak across the sky in every town, park and woodland.

When I was a child in Melbourne last century, rainbow lorikeets were not ever seen. When I lived on the Murray River in the 1990s, they were rarely seen but gradually increased in appearances. When I came to Yea in 2012, rainbow lorikeets were infrequent visitors. As of 2025, they are common in all those places. This shows that they are native birds who have thrived with the changes we have brought to the environment with our farming and urban landscapes – as have Noisy Miners and Magpies.

This colourful species was not present in Western Australia until they turned up in Perth a couple of decades ago; now their population is over 40,000 and reports that they are out-competing local species for nesting hollows are raising concern. They have recently arrived in Tasmania, and New Zealand has a program to prevent their multiplication there. They have also increased their range along the Eastern seaboard of Australia well beyond their original confines. Some have also established in Hong Kong.

They have some endearing qualities: they are monogamous, pairing for life mostly it seems, they are friendly and very photogenic. Both sexes look alike and they adapt well to aviaries – if you can put up with the screeching. But balancing those endearments, they display some negative qualities – raiding fruit trees, expelling nestlings of other birds so they can take the hollows, and dominating the limited food resources of the bush. The WA Department of Agriculture estimates $3 million damage annually to fruit crops by rainbow lorikeets.

They are adapted to eat nectar, pollen and fruits with a specialised ‘brush tongue’ that scoops out the nectar from within flowers. Trichoglossus means ‘hairy tongue’. (Eeww!)

So what’s the verdict? Pest or prize? Beautiful or bad boy? Are you over the rainbow? For all the problems they cause, it is hard to resist such very pretty faces. I’m grateful to live with them.