With its gleaming, velvety blue-and-black plumage, the male superb fairywren is easily distinguished. These ‘coloured’ males are often accompanied by a band of brown ‘jenny wrens’, often assumed to be a harem of females, but a proportion of them are males which have not yet attained their breeding plumage. The contents of these birds’ untidy nests — a clutch of three or four eggs — are not necessarily the progeny of the ‘coloured’ male, as there is much infidelity among female fairywrens, with many eggs resulting from extra-pair liaisons. |
