Habitat: The yellow-tufted honeyeater (Lichenostomus melanops) is found throughout their range in healthy eucalypt woodlands and open forests in southeastern Australia. Yellow-tufted honeyeaters live and breed in discrete colonies of 15–100 birds or more, often along creeks. There are often many variations in appearance between birds in different colonies, with those in high mountains or southern latitudes being larger than others elsewhere.
Races: Even so, there are only four distinct races.
-
The larger and more brilliantly colored of the two is the Helmeted Honeyeater, L. m. cassidix, previously regarded as a distinct species. Once widespread in western Gippsland, Victoria, it is now restricted, through habitat clearing, to a tiny area on Woori Yallock Creek near Yellingbo. Today, the population probably numbers no more than 100–150 birds. Recent shifts in local drainage have adversely affected the eucalypt woodland in which the birds live and made them more susceptible to insect attack. This in turn has brought in the pugnacious Bell Miner, which specializes in sap-sucking insects and also competes with and drives out the smaller Helmeted Honeyeater.
-
The other race, L.m. melanops, Gippsland yellow-tufted honeyeater is shorter-tailed and tufted on the forehead and has a paler back and a less clear-cut cream-tipped tail. It ranges along both scarps of the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales and north into southern It also ranges southwest to the Grampians, Victoria, and southeast to South Australia. Between it and the Helmeted Honeyeater along the southeastern gullies of the Range in central and eastern Gippsland is an extensive intergrazing population. This population was formerly treated as a separate race, L.m. gippslandica.
-
m. melanops, Sydney yellow-tufted honeyeater
-
m. meltoni, Inland yellow-tufted honeyeater, is duller in plumage and has a smaller tuft, which was described by G. M. Mathews in 1912.