Exhibits
The Lorikeet Diet
The lorikeet’s diet is comprised of nectar, pollen flowers, fruits, berries, and unripe grain. Their diet is limited to soft food because these birds have weak gizzards, which break up harder foods like seeds. Thus, they have a specialized tongue that allows them to easily consume their soft food and liquid diet. Tiny hair-like appendages called “papillae” form a “U” shape on the end of their tongue. When the tongue is extended, these papillae become erect, like bristles on a brush, expanding the tongue’s surface area and allowing the birds to easily soak up nectar and collect pollen from the blossoms. Unique to lorikeets, these papillae have earned them the name “brush-tongued parrots.”
Another characteristic unique to lorikeets is their beak structure. Designed to easily extract hard to reach seeds from cones, the birds’ upper mandible has a pointed tip and is much narrower than that of their parrot relatives. For harder fruits found in rainforest trees, the birds easily adapt by scraping the fruit on the inside of their open bill and then removing the sweet juice with their specialized tongue.
