Chestnut-rumped Thornbill - an exceptional small bird

Chestnut-rumped Thornbill
We are very excited that we have this exceptional small bird which is on the very edge of its range.
The Chestnut-rumped Thornbill is sparsely scattered through northern Victoria. Its population has declined and its range has contracted. It has disappeared from many sites around Chiltern, Warby Rangers and Rushworth. It is declining at the fringes of its range.
We started to set up our ponds early in 2014 and we saw our first Chestnut-rumped Thornbill late in October 2015 on just two dates. We did not see any again until we saw another single individual in April and June 2016. This delightful small bird arrived properly in February 2017 and stayed for 2 years, without a break in any month, till Jan 2019. During this time the numbers of Chestnut-rumped Thornbills went from 2 to 6 and they regularly visited our two ponds in our two large kangaroo exclusions. These areas have dense understory and contained many grasses which were able to go to seed even in the very dry weather.
Since then only one or two have been seen on 6 dates from April to June and none since. We hope that we still have our small population and that they are just not visiting the ponds as we have many natural water sources after some better rainfall.
This footage is from the pond in the old exclusion area and from the babbler pond. It mostly starts with the older footage and moves through to the most recent.
Chestnut-rumped Thornbills prefer the drier inland areas. They have unusual nesting habits because their dome-shaped nest is nearly always tucked into a hole in a dead or fallen tree or even into a stump or fence-post. The entrance is often extremely narrow, a mere crack or knot-hole in the wood, so that even this tiny bird has trouble squeezing through. Yet inside is a neatly constructed perfect dome. It is made of dried grasses and bark fibres, feathers and other soft materials are used for lining. Their food is insects and other small arthropods and they occasionally eat small seeds.
Chestnut-rumped Thornbills like dry open woodland with dense heathy understorey. In our area they especially like Grey Box with a dense low understorey of wattle, saltbush, Cassinia, heath and grass tussocks. They fly bouncingly showing their contrasting rump.
They are usually in parties of 4 to 6 birds and they often associate with other small ground and shrub-foraging insectivores in autumn and winter. They forage on or near the ground catching insects from low shrubs and fallen branches, they also probe bark low on tree trunks. They are often with other thornbills and whitefaces.

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