luri
luri
Malay
“A parrot that drinks nectar instead of cracking seeds — the lory of the Malay Archipelago gave English one of its earliest bird names from the region, and one of its most underappreciated avian groups.”
Lory derives from the Malay word luri, the local name for the brush-tongued parrots of the eastern Malay Archipelago, Australasia, and the Pacific islands. Dutch traders and naturalists in the Banda Islands and Moluccas (the Spice Islands of eastern Indonesia) encountered these brilliantly colored parrots in the seventeenth century and adopted the Malay name. The word entered English by the mid-seventeenth century, first recorded around 1691, as 'lory' — a slight anglicization of luri. The variant 'lorikeet' — applied to the smaller brush-tongued species — adds the Dutch diminutive suffix -keet (also seen in parakeet), the full compound first appearing in English records of the eighteenth century.
Lories and lorikeets (subfamily Loriinae) are a group of approximately fifty-five species of parrot native to Australasia, the Malay Archipelago, and the Pacific Islands. Unlike most parrots, which feed primarily on seeds and nuts, lories specialize in nectar and pollen. They possess a specialized brush-tipped tongue — the lori brush, after which they are named in some taxonomic traditions — that allows them to lick nectar from flowers. This dietary specialization gives lories a role as pollinators, particularly for trees whose flowers are too large for most insects. It also makes them messy in captivity: a nectar-based diet produces copious liquid droppings, which has not diminished their popularity as pet birds.
The Spice Islands (Maluku / Moluccas) of eastern Indonesia were the center of the clove and nutmeg trade that drove the first age of European globalization. Dutch VOC ships frequenting the Banda Islands, Ternate, Tidore, and Ambon encountered lories as a routine feature of the landscape — brilliantly colored parrots in the same forests where the spice trees grew. Dutch naturalists Georg Eberhard Rumphius (stationed on Ambon for decades in the seventeenth century) documented lories alongside the local flora and fauna. The Malay name luri, standardized as 'lory' in English, was one of the first Austronesian bird names to enter the European scientific vocabulary.
The rainbow lorikeet (Trichoglossus moluccanus) — native to coastal Australia and adjacent islands — became the most widely recognized species in the genus outside its home range, partly through deliberate introductions to western Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong, and partly through the global pet trade. In several Australian coastal cities, wild rainbow lorikeet populations have become a vivid feature of urban parks, where they feed on flowering eucalyptus and grevillea. The Malay-derived name persists across the entire subfamily: lory and lorikeet remain the standard English terms.
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Today
Rainbow lorikeets are now so common in Australian coastal cities that they function as urban wildlife rather than exotic birds. They arrive at garden feeders, roost noisily in palm trees, and fly in screeching flocks through the suburbs of Sydney and Brisbane at dawn and dusk. Their color — red, blue, green, orange, yellow — seems excessive for a bird that could have been gray, and their noise seems excessive for a neighborhood that preferred quiet. They are entirely indifferent to both of these assessments.
The word lory, Malay in origin, captured by Dutch spice traders in the same islands where cloves grew, now describes one of the most abundant visible species in Australian coastal cities. The Spice Islands that launched the Dutch East India Company are far from Sydney in every possible way. The parrot name connects them across four centuries of linguistic migration.
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