My wife suggests that the brown bird is a female red-capped robin, but since this guy was hanging around, my feeling is it's a female flame robin. Thoughts?
females of those two are hard. Quite possibly a flame, but it looks like it may have a faint red wash on the forehead which would make it a red-capped. Sort of looks most like a red-capped really. If it was me, I'd leave it as an unknown.
yes but I gather he also saw males of red-capped, flame and pink (if I remember right), so the identity of this particular female isn't of the utmost importance.
Well, I definitely saw male red-capped and flame robins. My wife insists that one of the pics we took is of a female pink robin, and not surprisingly, I must have deleted it as being a blurry crap one. To keep my wife interested in birding, I don't argue when she is 'convinced' it is a certain species and I cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt she is wrong. Zooboy, in case you want to see some of these robins (I also saw eastern yellow robins), we saw flame robins and yellow robins in large numbers on Mount Macedon and the red-capped was spotted in the Long Forest Fauna Reserve. The sittatella was also seen in the LFFR, along with a very cool black face cuckoo shrike. In one day we knocked of those sites and made a whistle stop tour of Serendip.