page_title: Buff-sided robin
section_title: Habitat
hierarchical_section_title: Buff-sided robin / Habitat
caption_attribution_description: English: Riparian forest in the eastern Northern Territory
context_page_description: The buff-sided robin is a small, diurnal, insectivorous, perching bird in the family Petroicidae, a group commonly known as the Australo-Papuan or Australasian robins. It is also known as the buff-sided fly-robin, buff-sided shrike-robin and Isabellflankenschnäpper. The buff-sided robin is endemic to northern Australia, where it primarily occurs in riparian forests and monsoon vine thickets from the Kimberly region of Western Australia to the north-west Queensland Gulf of Carpentaria. The plumage of the adult birds is characterised by a dark hood and back with a prominent white stripe on the supercilium, a white throat, white wing and tail bars, and a striking buff to orange patch on the flank below the wings. Adult birds are not sexually dimorphic; however, males are generally larger and can be separated from females based on morphological measurements. Buff-sided robins predominantly take insects from the ground by sallying from an observational perch. Insect prey are also occasionally taken by hawking on the wing or by gleaning from the trunk or foliage of riparian vegetation.
context_section_description: The buff-sided robin is largely confined to dense riparian vegetation, and subcoastal and sandstone monsoon vine-thickets. At riparian sites, it prefers thickets of freshwater mangrove, pandanus, and bamboo. The core riparian forest habitat of the buff-sided robin is characterised by canopy and sub-canopy trees, including Melaleuca leucadendra, Nauclea orientalis, Ficus, Terminalia, Pandanus aquaticus, and Barringtonia acutangula. Buff-sided robins are strongly associated with these dense, closed canopy, vegetation communities, rarely venturing into adjacent drier and more open forest types. Buff-sided robins have been reported occasionally from tidally influenced mangrove communities near the coast.
  Observations of the habitat of the buff-sided robin were provided by Elsey, who described it as living in "mangroves" on the Victoria River, a reference to the freshwater mangrove (Barringtonia acutangula) that occurs on the lower banks of freshwater reaches of rivers in the region. Whitlock confirmed Elsey's habitat observations on the Victoria River, reporting that the buff-sided robin was "...one of the most attractive inhabitants of the river forests, to which it seemed to be almost exclusively confined", and that it "...favoured thickets of freshwater mangroves". Hill described the buff-sided robin on the McArthur River (Gulf of Carpentaria) as being "Found in thick scrub and timber in sheltered localities, generally near water". Barnard described it as  "...common along the water-courses and in the brush growing at the foot of the sandstone bluffs" in the McArthur River catchment, the latter comment referring to dry monsoon vine-thickets associated with sandstone escarpments. At the eastern extremity of its range on the Gregory River (north-western Queensland), the buff-sided robin was reported by McClennan to occur in riverine habitat and "...when disturbed makes for the pandanus growing along the river-banks, where it is usually to be found at other times, and in which it doubtless nests."
caption: Typical riparian habitat of the buff-sided robin with fringing Melaleuca leucadendra, Nauclea orientalis and Barringtonia acutangula. Eastern Northern Territory
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