around by hopping. Its head, neck, breast, and upper belly are velvet black, its upper parts are olive-green, and its lower belly and are scarlet red. The wings are green with a golden sheen and have a shining blue patch on the lesser , and the flight feathers and underwing are black. The tail is olive-green with a black base and the sometimes have a silvery-blue band across them. It has a black bill, pink legs, brown eyes and a chestnut stripe along each side of its crown. Many individuals display the pitta family's characteristic dark streaks, which can be arrow-shaped or stripes, through the middle of the feathers of the upper part of the body; examination of study skins have found around 60% of rainbow pittas have them. This varies somewhat regionally, as birds from Darwin were found to have none. Uniquely in the pitta family the streaks are not dusky or blackish but are instead bronze-coloured in this species. The plumage is essentially the same for both sexes; females may have slightly more buff-yellow in their flanks and a slightly different shade of red on the lower belly, but these differences do not make the sexes distinguishable by plumage. The subspecies P. i. johnstoneiana is very similar to the nominate race, except the chestnut eyebrow is larger, as is the wing-spot, but the bird overall is slightly smaller. Distribution and habitat The rainbow pitta is endemic to the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and is found from sea-level to . It is the only species of pitta endemic to Australia. In the Northern Territory it is found in the Top End, from Darwin east to the edge of the Arnhem Escarpment. Further east it is found on Groote Eylandt and the Wessel Islands. In Western Australia it is restricted to the coastal Kimberley, from Walcott Inlet to Middle Osborn Island. It is also found on some of the islands of the Bonaparte Archipelago. It is found most commonly in monsoon forest and in adjacent vine-scrub and gallery forest, and also occurs in eucalypt forest, bamboo forests, paperbark forest and scrub, Lophostemon forests and the edges of mangrove forests (but never in mangrove forests themselves). It is mostly found in closed forests, but is also found in more open forests. It has sometimes been found in plantations of introduced pines, and has even bred in that habitat. This species