| It was some years ago that I last visited Boundary Stream while I was a member of the East Coast Conservation Board. But the memory remains of a pair of riflemen there. I must have spent a good hour watching them, totally rapt in their behaviour, while my friends went in search of other species.
The pair I was watching did not move far from the few trees I could see about me. They would start at the bottom of a tree and work their way up in short hops and with fluttering wings, diligently searching in the crannies and bark in the moss and lichen growing there. They would then drop with open wings to the bole of another tree and start the process over again. They used their relatively large feet to grip the rough trunks of trees and assisted themselves with quick flicks of their wings. The pair kept in contact with their short high–pitched calls. Unlike the fantail, they never chased insects into the air, possibly because their powers of flight are too feeble.
The ornithologist, Oliver, says the rifleman has its own beat and traverses the same territory every day. He relates a poignant observation that even when the bush was cut down around him the rifleman remained in the felled timber. Buller has said that “it moved with such celerity that it is rather difficult for the collector to obtain a shot”!
Narena Olliver, July 2007.
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