Description
Rachel writes: When I began my research into existing Australian Christmas carols, I came across an excellent article written in 2021 in The Guardian by Melbourne- based writer, Patrick Lenton, entitled ‘Australian Christmas songs ranked by how baffling they are to literally anyone else’. Patrick created three categories to rank songs: the confusion rating, the Australian rating, and finally, the amount of birds. This is what eventually led me to the Mistletoebird. I was completely unaware that we had species of mistletoe that were native to Australia, but it’s true! In fact, we have 97 different species, including the stunning Western Australian Christmas Tree, Nuytsia floribunda, which produces intensely bright yellow flowers during summer. What intrigues me most about the native mistletoe plants is that they are generally described as only ‘semi-parasitic’, meaning that the benefits do go both ways, and the balanced presence of mistletoe, and by extension, mistletoebirds, indicates the health of an ecosystem.