Showcasing the beauty of Mother Nature
Travelling through southern Africa, pretty much any time of year, will provide the opportunity to see a great variety of birds. Today I chose to focus on ones with feathers in shades of blue. I hope you enjoy the variety of images today, and wishing you a wonderful weekend!
It seems a little bit strange creating a blog post that doesn’t actually show you what a red-billed quelea looks like up close. I don’t think on any of my trips to southern Africa I have managed to get that type of shot. What I wanted to share with you today was some shots of the stunning murmurations that the quelea display.
These little birds are the most abundant bird species on earth, and many farmers consider them a pest, given the way they can strip a cultivated field in the blink of an eye. I can understand the devastation that they cause when they end up in cultivated areas on mass, but watching them out in the bush against a colourful sunset is an absolute sight to behold (and definitely one worth putting down the sundowner glass of wine, and picking up the camera).
My only regret is I didn’t switch into video mode at any of these sightings; I’ll put that on my to-do list for the next time. 🙂
I hope you enjoy these images, and wishing you a fantastic week ahead.
Everyone that enjoys watching birds and photographing them knows that there are some species that are harder than others to get images of. I love the challenge of trying to capture that elusive clear image of a bird that tends to hide in the densest part of the treetops.
Locally, we have beautiful birds like the Western Tanager; a bird that I have only seen a handful of times, and photographed only on a rare occasion. The incredible yellow plumage on the males makes them targets for predatory birds, so sticking to dense areas makes a lot of sense. I admired the beautiful song of the Hermit Thrush for years before I finally saw a small brown and white bird singing, and had my first clue to discover the identity I had wondered about for so long.
While traveling, I kept up with trying to ID and photograph birds hiding in treetops and thickets. Some were deep amongst the leafy trees foraging for fruits, some were naturally shy and trying hard to stay out of sight, and sometimes, it was just unlucky positioning of the vehicle, and having to shoot through branches and grasses, before the bird flew away.
Here are a few of my shots of some of the more challenging birds spotted on my last trip.
Last week, I featured hornbills for my topic of the month, and this week, it is birds in the dark. I had started typing out birds at night, but one of the images was taken at daybreak, and I thought it best to try and be accurate 🙂
I was very fortunate to have several different owl sightings during my travels, as well as two nightjar sightings. The nightjars were by far the easiest to photograph, as they tend to lay in the road after dark, and if you are lucky you can drive the vehicle fairly close to them and use a spotlight. Owls are a more challenging one, unless you are lucky enough to find them very close to the road, and not spook them when driving up.
This past trip, the first owl sighting I had was on my first evening game drive, and it was rather exciting. I spotted this owl far away on a tree, and as we watched for a few moments, we realized it had a kill it was working on. The terrain made it impossible to drive any closer, so I had to do the best I could with a 400mm lens and a bit of cropping; the quality isn’t fantastic, but the moment was definitely memorable.
I had one eagle sighting while in the Timbavati, of a pearl-spotted owlet, but unfortunately by the time I got the attention of our ranger to stop, the owl was in flight and all I got was a butt shot as it flew away. And not even a decent butt shot; it’s completely blurry and not worth sharing. There’s always next time though 🙂
The rest of the sightings of birds in the dark all came while staying at Chitwa Chitwa with Harley as our guide. Harley really seemed to enjoy pointing out birds, and identifying the ones that I would randomly point at (generally small raptors which I still have a terrible time identifying).
The southern white-faced owl and the spotted eagle owl were seen within about 10 minutes of each other while heading back to camp for dinner; and then the pair of Verreaux’s eagle owls were spotted the following morning as we set off from camp.
Nightjar’s are a common bird to see on game drives at night, but a lot of times they fly away before you have a chance to capture a picture. This past trip, I was fortunate to have two sightings of different species that I could get decent images of.
I hope you enjoy my selections for the week. Wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead!
As mentioned last week, I am going to focus on birds for my Sunday posts during the month of August. I had some really interesting bird sightings during my recent travels, and I am looking forward to editing and sharing some of the moments.
I decided to start off with hornbills; the only reason being that a hornbill was the first bird image I took when I got to the bush, so it seemed a logical enough place to start. I posted a few hornbill images back in June as a wordless Wednesday post; you can find those here.
During my travels, I saw 5 different species of hornbill, including several sightings on two different properties of the endangered southern ground hornbill. Our rangers shared some fascinating information about these birds; the southern ground hornbill has helpers to raise their chick; these baby-sitters put in several years of assistance duties before they take on the responsibility of mating themselves.
More common to see while out on game drives and the red and yellow billed hornbills (or banana head and chill pepper as they seem to be called quite often :)) Our rangers also explained some interesting facts about the breeding habits of the hornbills; I am not 100% certain if this applies to all the African hornbill species, but during breeding, the female will lay eggs into a tree hollow, and then allow herself to be sealed up inside the tree cavity with only a small opening to allow the male to pass food in to her and the chicks once they hatch. The female removes all her flight feathers during this time and allows them to regrow while nesting, and as such she is completely reliant on her mate for her survival, as well as the survival of their offspring. Such trust!
These last two hornbills are less common (at least for me) to see while out in the bush. I’ve seen the grey hornbill and crowned hornbill each on only one other occasion. Both of these were spotted while out on game drives from Lion Sands River Lodge.
Here are some images from the past week of my travels, staying at two properties; Lions Sands River and Tinga Lodges. I have had a wonderful time being back in the bush again! It’s tea time shortly and then off to see what the afternoon has in store, so I will keep this brief.
I hope you enjoy my selections!
A random selection of bird images this week!
This week I have really been trying to look for signs of spring. Honest, I have. But waking up today, the temperature was -29C with a high of -12C for the day, and it really does feel like spring is far away. I have noticed a few things though. I can see about a 6″ band of shingles on the roof of my house, from the days when it has been warm enough for a bit of melt to happen. I noticed one lone willow tree, buried in about 4 feet of snow drift at the side of the road, starting to bud (despite the cold in was enveloped in). But mostly, I have noticed the trees.
It has been stark white for a very long time in my back yard, and over the past two weeks, between the strong winds and the the (slightly) warming days, the evergreens have shed the huge cloaks of snow from their branches. There are still bits of snow tucked into the crook of branches here and there, but finally when I look out my windows, I see a bit of green, rather than just white.
Pictures of bare branches in my backyard seemed a bit boring, but frankly, getting all bundled up to do a photo walk this weekend also didn’t hold much appeal. So I went out for a short time to photograph some of the birds feasting on the sunflower seeds. Today, only the chickadees were around, though usually there is a pair of red-breasted nuthatches plus the woodpeckers that pass through. The chickadees made a steady stream from branch to feeder and back again; I couldn’t count them all as they were constantly coming in from every direction.
As a bird lover, one of the sad parts about the temperature warming is soon the birds will have to fend for themselves, once it warms enough for there to be a threat of bears visiting the feeders. I think we have a ways to go before that is an issue though.
Here are a few chickadees for today; fingers crossed next weekend there are more signs of spring around.
