Bird Ringing at Wild Flower Garden

Saturday morning, Robyn and Adel and our guest, Felicity Ellmore, went bird ringing in the Wild Flower Garden.  It was a wonderful warm day and the birds were buzzing all around us. 

We ringed about 50 birds, most of them White-eyes.  I can't believe there are still White-eyes that I have not ringed yet. One of the White-eyes had some feathers missing from the top of beak.  Not sure why.

We also caught our first Yellow Bishop, still in non-breeding colours.

We also caught a very handsome looking Southern Masked-weaver and he had a strange mark in his eye.

A cheeky Speckled Mousebird was hanging around but refused to fly into the net so didn't get to ring him.... this time!

I have started my own personal bird blog so feel free to have a look at it here.

Lynedoch Winter List

Last Saturday (7th of Aug), a 3-person team set off to do the winter bird list at Lynedoch Eco Village as a follow-up to the Summer list we did in January.  In total, we listed 30 birds, 17 of them the same species as in January but 13 of them were totally different  birds. 

Thanks to Jill Heistein for joining us for the morning.

There was much nest-building by the Cape Weavers in full breeding face flush

 and Southern Masked Weavers in full face mask.

Lots of Cape Sparrows, something we don't see in Franschhoek so much anymore.

And there were plenty of White-backed Mousebirds to keep us entertained.

 Cape Robin-chat, my namesake.

 We stopped off at Spier after the listing to add a few more birds to our atlasing card and found this sleepy African Darter on the water.

And we took photos of the weavers nest for the ADU's virtual museum (for more info on this new interesting website, click here).

Amethyst Sunbirds chicks have hatched

We were very excited to hear the faint "cheep cheep" call coming from the Amethyst Sunbirds nest in the big fir tree in our garden.  Even better is that the nest is right outside Room 28 on our first floor and we can get great views of the parents who are killing themselves feeding these hungry little mouths.

Daddy bird on duty

They are back and forth every 5 minutes so hopefully we will be able to get even better pics as the days go on.  The nest is facing slightly away from the building so we don't have 100% clear view but we can see the little beaks with their huge yellow gapes very clearly.  So sweet.

Mommy bird on duty

He is such a handsome fella

See the big yellow gape?  Just to make sure that mom and dad know where to put the food.

Open Wiiiidddddeeeeee

And lets not forgot about Mrs Hadeda sitting on her nest at the moment....

We are putting up with the early morning raucous but they sure are loud!

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