The female is dull brown, with a greenish-blue tail and brown facial markings. The non-breeding males resemble the females, except that they have blue tails and paler facial skin around the eyes and bill. Superb Wrens have thrived in the environments created by human land use, and can be found in pastures, fields, and gardens. They prefer areas of mixed grassland for foraging and shrubby cover for nesting and protection from predators. Insectivorous, these birds forage in groups, so that insects stirred up by the activities of one bird may be captured by another.
Social groups are sedentary in a single territory, where they remain all year.
Some authors claim that the Superb wrens cooperative breeding is a newly evolved trait, however the predominance of cooperative breeding in other endemic Australian bird taxa suggests that at the point of their radiation during the early Tertiary, Australian birds developed the cooperative breeding strategy in response to the local environment. Australian birds, therefore, probably developed social behavior during the Pleistocene as well. Superb Fairy-wrens, by having a variable reproductive strategy which can be both monogamous and cooperative, and by being adaptable to a variety of habitats, have been able to fare well in the changing environments of the Australian landscape. Birds photographed by John Young. The four remaining races breed between the southern U.S. and Panama, with the most southern races being nonmigratory or altitudinal migrants.