In places where people
feed them, rainbow lorikeets
will often come close to people

What do they do all day?
Rainbow lorikeets spend most of their days feeding. They'll happily go for flowers, pollen, nectar, seeds, insects and fruit. They often take over a tree in swarms, especially trees with ripening fruit. I used to live in a place with a giant fig tree outside my bedroom window. When the figs were ripening, the fruit bats would arrive to screech and fight over the fruit all night. Then at the crack of dawn the bats would leave and the rainbow lorikeets would turn up for the day shift. I didn't get much sleep at those times. This habit of taking over fruiting trees has created a big problem for Northern Territory farmers, some of whom lose most of their fruit crops to these birds.

Despite their vivid colours, rainbow lorikeets can be difficult to see in a tree

Making a nuisance
During the day they tend to stay in small flocks, but close to sunset the groups will often assemble into giant roosting flocks of up to a thousand, taking over stands of trees and creating a deafening racket. Like the Indian mynah, rainbows often prefer to form these giant roosting flocks near shopping centres. I've seen very large numbers of the birds in crowded areas near shops in Dee Why and Noosaville.

I remember one poor gum tree at Noosaville which the lorikeets seemed to prefer and it was almost completely stripped of leaves by the playful clipping from the lorikeets' sharp beaks. To walk under the tree when the birds were roosting was to walk through a light rain of shredded leaves. So I guess that wasn't much good for the tree! The noise those birds, and the hundreds of others in nearby trees made was outrageous, and they didn't seem the least bit worried by having shops, people and cars nearby.

A common mistake people make is to think that, just because an animal or plant comes from Australia, then it's a native in every bit of Australia. But Australia is a big place with some very extensive dry areas separating the east and west coasts. The ecology of each coast has had plenty of time to develop unique features, and releasing an east-coast bird into the west-coast environment can cause problems for the local wildlife and also for people. In Tim Low's excellent book the new nature, Low describes how in South Australia, rainbow lorikeets are considered as big a pest as starlings because they bred up into big numbers and are eating their way through fruit crops. He also tells a story about how rainbow lorrikeets, perhaps released or escaped from captivity, took over some of the best nesting holes in Perth, on some occasions attacking birds that were already in the holes, and killing them.