Michael´s Fourth Year

[TonyQ]

A really enjoyable collection from Gabon, the Bluebill is special.

I am sure you will find four more birds this year. Any work trips planned?

[michael-ibk]

Thanks Tony. Unfortunately not but I still might have some tricks up my sleeve.

[PeterHG]

An impressive collection of sunbirds, @michael-ibk and your sunbird-in-flight is setting a new standard!

[xelas]

1 hour ago, michael-ibk said:

but I still might have some tricks up my sleeve.

I am quite sure you have 5 more tricks up your sleeve . The bird total from Gabon is impressive, and yes, those sunbirds are beauties.

[pedro maia]

500 will be easy, great collection of Gabon birds and it’s a real pleasure to see an accomplished photographer like you posting a couple of real EBC’s .

[Galana]

I also am sure you will get passed 500 soon enough. A great collection from Gabon with some interesting species.

I am no authority and more than happy to leave the Cisticolas to you . One caught my eye, the one whose tail made you unhappy. Is that not also Siffling (Shortwinged)?

For your Bates' Sunbird consider "Gabonensis" as even the name helps!!

A typo crept in to your script for Quelea. You meant to write "Red-billed" as the more common cousin.

 

More please.

Well done on the attempted EBCs.

[Soukous]

what a fabulous collection @michael-ibk, You must have been grinning from ear to ear

[michael-ibk]

18 hours ago, Galana said:

I am no authority and more than happy to leave the Cisticolas to you . One caught my eye, the one whose tail made you unhappy. Is that not also Siffling (Shortwinged)?

For your Bates' Sunbird consider "Gabonensis" as even the name helps!!

 

Do you mean Mangrove (formerly Brown) Sunbird, Anthreptes gabonicus? I considered that one but the habitat seems all wrong. That is a bird of mangroves and forested river banks according to the book, so I concluded it should not pop up in the middle of the rain forest. It´s difficult to find good pictures of Bates´ on the web but it also seems to have a pretty obvious eyering. About Short-Winged, entirely possible, my choice was based mainly on habitat, and Short-Winged does not seem to be the type which favours wet patches like that. But happy to change both if you think you are sure, I am definitely not. You still owe me one additional Greenbul though, don´t forget about the Slender-Billed.

[Galana]

1 hour ago, michael-ibk said:

You still owe me one additional Greenbul though, don´t forget about the Slender-Billed.

Refresh my memory please!

As to the Sunbirds I have no firm convictions. My suggestion of Brown/Mangrove was simply based on it jumping off the page at me due to the amount of white around the face. Habitat did not occur to me as I don't know the locations at all. There are very few female sunbirds with much white. I can only think of Western Violet backed and Blue-throated Brown. . Awful pictures in both Sinclair and Borrow/Helm. I did find this.

 

 

Again the Siffling C. was simply an opinion/option.

[inyathi]

@michael-ibk 

 

Nice shot of the blue cuckooshrike I saw one in Ghana but the only photo I got was a silhouette. I would disagree with any of your greenbuls but then along with cisticolas they are my least favourite African birds, I tend to just accept that they are whatever my guide tells me they are. I was very lucky in Gabon to have Patrice Christy as our bird guide in Ivindo and Lope, he wrote the book on the birds of Lope NP and helped with the Birds of Africa South of the Sahara, he only agreed to come on our safari, because he was working on the Bird Atlas of Gabon and had never visited the grid square that Langoue Bai is in, as the birding tours he normally helps guide don’t go there. Thanks to him I saw more greenbuls than could ever have hoped to see and although I’ve added on a few more in Ghana since and perhaps a couple elsewhere, if you can’t separate them on distribution then you need really need to know the calls. Serious bird guides of course, call them in so they know that the if the bird responds it’s the species, they’ve called in.    

 

I’m not sure about that sunbird I’m agree that it looks more like the mangrove/brown also called mouse brown sunbird than Bates’s, the markings on the face don’t look like any of the illustrations of Bates’s that I’ve looked at, Bates’s is also a forest canopy species, if that helps at all. I’ve just looked them both up in BOA and it does say that the brown occurs in Gabon as far inland as the Ivindo River, so I that might suggest it is possible that it occurs in Ivindo.  I saw the mangrove sunbird as it’s usually now called, in Ghana but not well enough to be sure that that is what your bird is. If it’s not mangrove, I think it is perhaps a surprising place to see one, then I would suggest that it’s possibly a female or a juvenile, but I don’t know.    

 

It looks like Gabon must have provided you with a whole lot of new species, just as it did for me, this of course why it's quite a popular country for birders. 

[inyathi]

I've had another think about the sunbird, after I spotted my copy of the Birds of Ghana and decided to looked at that sunbirds and thought that the mangrove sunbird's bill is too short for your bird, that and the fact that it seems an unlikely place to see a mangrove sunbird, I'm going rule that species out and also Bates's as it really doesn't look like any of the illustrations, instead having looked at all of my books, I would suggest that it is a female blue-throated brown I think that's the most likely, another possibility is a female green-throated, but I think the blue-throated is a better match, however, without being able to see the front of the bird it's hard to be sure. You really need to look at different illustrations, because the female blue-throated brown shown in Stevenson and Fanshawe's Birds of East Africa looks quite different to the bird shown in the Birds of Western Africa (I assume they're not different subspecies) and it's always worth looking to see if there are any photos on perhaps the African Bird Club website or elsewhere on the web, you might find a few photos often taken by Nik Borrow, his photos are I think sometimes more useful than his illustrations in BOWA.   

[Soukous]

@inyathi , @Galana, once again I'm just in awe of your dedication to the science of bird identification. 

I wish I had a fraction of your confidence, and patience. Luckily for me you are both there as an online resource. 

[Galana]

3 hours ago, inyathi said:

You really need to look at different illustrations, because the female blue-throated brown shown in Stevenson and Fanshawe's Birds of East Africa looks quite different to the bird shown in the Birds of Western Africa (I assume they're not different subspecies)

Two votes for female  BT Brown Sunbird. That illustration in BoWA would be 'underexposed' if it were a photo.Never thought to check in S&F of East Africa. Now it has been elevated to a target for my next visit to Uganda where my checklist says I have seen it before.

My checklist does have it as C.cyanolaema octaviae  which I hope is not a Ssp.

Thanks @Soukous. I am a great addict of mysteries and I guess it just carries over to birds.

[michael-ibk]

19 hours ago, Galana said:

Refresh my memory please!

 

See Bird 454 on page 23.

 

And many thanks @inyathi and @Galana, Blue-Throated Brown Sunbird it is then! Does not change the count since I did not have that bird anyway, so good for me.

 

Inyathi, Fantastic you had Patrice Christie guide you, from all I´ve read he seems to be birdman Nr. 1 in Gabon. And you´re right many new ones for me (but then I still very much am a beginner). I read that dedicated birding groups get more than 400 species on trips like this - definitely tempting!

[Galana]

5 hours ago, michael-ibk said:

See Bird 454 on page 23.

Ah yes. Caught without my African books in Italy.

With a good hard stare on a larger screen with lighting controls I tend to see the same lighter belly /contrast  in #1 as in #2 which makes it a slender billed. (That's a terrible picture in Sinclair b.t.w.).

I did consider Cameroon Sombre due to the hint of a light throat but no eye ring and the big screen at home changes my mind.  Nul point! Sorry.

(Memo to self. Take S&F to West Africa as Sinclair's Greenbuls are rubbish.)

[inyathi]

@michael-ibkYes we were very lucky to get Patrice he’s pretty busy and almost always booked up by the major birding companies, they’ve always visited Makokou in the north of Ivindo National Park, since before it was a national park, they don’t go to Langoue Bai, so he’d never been, otherwise we wouldn’t have got him. Regrettably we didn’t have him in Loango.

 

@Galana I have S&F on my iPad, it is the great thing about being able to get electronic bird books they don’t weigh anything, I actually bought it for my last visit to Chad, I never would have taken the actual book, since I was taking BOWA, I didn’t want two books in my luggage, and the electronic version has bird calls. Buying an East African bird app to take to Chad made sense, whereas buying and taking the actual book wouldn't have. When I go to Zambia next month, I’ll have Sinclair’s book, plus S & F and probably SASOL on my iPad and hopefully a birds of Zambia app if it’s available in time. The more recent edition of Sinclair is just that bit heavier than the first one, I certainly wouldn’t want a second book to take as well.

[xelas]

@inyathi what iPad source of bird info do you recommend for Uganda? I know @Galana will have his paper book arsenal with him, but I would like to have something less heavy (to offset for camera weight ).

Also, would you be so kind and post links to all of the apps you are using? Or sent them by PM. Many thanks in advance!

 

Sorry Michael for this interruption. But you are already close to #500 ..... maybe over this weekend?

[Galana]

10 hours ago, inyathi said:

electronic bird books they don’t weigh anything

No but the bloody ancilliaries such as Charger, Adapter, leads et al do!

Never had a book with a flat battery. Or killed a Tsetse with an App.

 

Good luck in Zambia. I will be following in December.

 

Better give @michael-ibk his thread back as he is birding this week end.

Edited October 5, 2019 by Galana
Additional text.

[michael-ibk]

No problem guys, no birding anyway this weekend. The way @TonyQ is going I´m afraid I´m soon gonna be toast here at the top so I better hurry to at least cross the next century before him!

 

497/E174.) European Greenfinch (Chloris chloris) / Grünfink

 

Fulpmes, 7/7. One from the balcony. This bird has been decreasing a lot in Europe due to an infectious disease. I´ve read that populations in parts of England dropped by one-third within a year of the emergence of trichomonosis, and also here they´ve been hit badly. Sadly I also had a dead one last year and immediately stopped feeding. No dead birds around home 2019 fortunately.

 

[michael-ibk]

498/E175.) European Turtle Dove (Streptopelia turtur) / Turteltaube

 

A leftover from my Bulgaria trip, Rhodopian Mountains, 6/7. Sadly not a single one photographed in Austria this year, they are becoming rarer and rarer.

 

 

499/E176.) Eurasian Collared Dove (Streptopelia decaocto) / Türkentaube

 

Seewinkel, 16/9. Not a problem getting this species, very common in Austria´s lowlands (none in the Alps however), I just tend to forget about them.

 

[michael-ibk]

500/E177.) Eurasian Bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula) / Gimpel

 

Valser Tal, Tirol, 22/9. I only see a handful of Bullfinches each year and they tend to be pretty shy most of the time. So I was delighted to find this one on an autumn hike - too busy feeding to bother about me.

 

 

 

[Tdgraves]

Congrats on 500 @michael-ibk will it be enough??!?

[TonyQ]

Congratulations on reaching 500. High quality throughout and a beautiful bird to reach the magic number!

[Galana]

m

Edited October 11, 2019 by Galana

[Galana]

Lovely Bullfinch. And congratulations for passing the 500 with it.

 

Greenfinches in UK seem to have staged a recovery from a few years back which is good news.

Sadly I cannot say the same for Turtle Doves that is still suffering badly due to hunting pressure in Malta.  Ooops! I should just say Mediterranean areas.