Meet The Purple-Crowned Fairy-Wren, The Most Faithful Of All The Fairy-Wrens (7 Pics)

The purple crowned fairy-wren is not an easy bird to miss. With its unique violet-purple crown and perky blue tail grabbing all the attention. It’s quite a small, shy bird and while colouring of plumage will vary according to age, mostly they are brown above, white below, with a long, perky blue tail.

The greatest threat to the subspecies is degradation or loss of habitat. Livestock seeking water eat and trample riparian vegetation, and more frequent and/or more intense fires have also been detrimental in some places. Anne- Marie van Doorn (pers.comm.) reports a decrease of 50 per cent in the adult populations at two sites where grazing and trampling was allowed around habitat patches over a two year period. The canegrass in these areas recovered quickly after the area was fenced, but the wren population has not yet recovered. Boekel (1979) described a similar pattern in the Victoria River area in the 1970s, with cattle grazing destroying habitat during bad droughts and exposing wrens to predation by cats, and failure to recolonise once habitat had apparently recovered.