Bark feeding

I was out for a few minutes around 7am this morning near my house (Far South Coast of NSW) and heard lots and lots of bark feeding. This is usually kind of fun to track down as you can often see birds doing something interesting. I’m used to seeing White-naped Honey-eaters play a neat trick of pulling off some bark and then floating down to catch whatever comes out. And, of cousre, Sitella are great ones for pulling at bark, one way or another. Anyway, when I was out this morning and heard the noise I was figuring/hoping it was a bunch of Sitella…but I didn’t hear anything like them calling. Instead, what I found were a lot of New Holland Honey-eaters gleaning along the branches, which I don’t normally think of them doing. (They spend their time in blossoms around here in the day.) I also noticed lots of Lewin’s Honey-eaters, maybe five? We’ve got a couple of young around right now so numbers are denser than usual. I saw one on a branch prying open one of those gum leaves that spiders hide in. Then I saw at least one more going after another one of those leaves that was still suspended in a spider-thread, they way they are. At least one of the other looked like he was hunting for spider leaves. I’m assuming everyone here knows about those leaves. You see them in the bush all the time, a single dead leaf all curled up like a scroll hanging in space suspended on either side by a thread. There’s a spider sleeping in there, or so I’ve been shown. So, the Lewins seemed to be targetting them very specifically. It makes sense, they’re the right size bird to get the job done and I’m sure the spiders are a treat for them…but I’d not noticed this before. Is there any chance any of you have noticed this? I’d be curious about bark-feeding observations in general for different species around Aus as well, for that matter.