Highlights of the Past Week

Male sunbirds are some of the most colourful birds that you might find in Harare. If you spend time watching them, you will notice a dazzling array of iridescent colours, especially when the sunlight catches them at just the right angle. Probably the most common sunbird in Harare gardens - the Variable Sunbird - has colours ranging from green through blue to purple, which contrast strongly with it's bright yellow belly.

Male Variable Sunbird

If you're lucky enough to see a male sunbird displaying, you might also notice it's pectoral tufts, or epaulettes,  which it raises as part of the performance.

A male Variable Sunbird with raised epaulettes, just after displaying to a female.
This individual was ringed in September 2011.

Along with the sunbirds, I have been busy photographing birds around Borrowdale Brooke recently:

Male Cut-throat Finch.

Common Moorhens fighting. I have seen this behaviour often, but never caught it on camera before.

African Stonechat female.

The weavers are getting into the breeding season already. Village Weavers have already started in the Brooke, and this Southern Masked-weaver is now busy building.

One more exciting thing from Borrowdale Brooke this week - in fact it even found its way into my house! It was some sort of insectivorous bat, currently unidentified, and quite a large one too.

We went ringing at Greystone Park on the 4th of August, in an attempt to catch some of the breeding Village Weavers. We caught some, along with birds like White-browed Robin-chat, Red-faced Cisticola and Bar-throated Apalis.

One of the Red-faced Cisticolas we caught was a re-trap, originally ringed as an adult in September 2010 - almost two years ago.

Another Red-faced Cisticola (we caught 5 that morning) had an interesting tail moult...

All 6 feathers on the right side (starting at the plain brown one in the middle) are old and not currently in moult.
The outer 3 on the left are the same, but the inner three are all in active moult.
This is interesting because usually tail feathers are moulted symmetrically - for example the two inner (plain) feathers would moult at the same time, followed by the next ones going outwards until the outermost two moult together.

Bar-throated Apalis

There seems to be a number of African Spoonbills floating around at the moment. I saw one in Borrowdale Brooke on the 5th of August, one at Greengrove Dam on the same day and one at Greystone Park on the 4th.

Other good sightings at Greengrove include the usual Hottentot Teal, African Purple Swamphen, African Rail (heard), Three-banded Plover, plus a Lilac-breasted Roller and two Red-winged Starlings flying over. However, no Ibis, Egrets or Cormorants came to roost on the island.

The very best sighting out of all of these trips was also at Greengrove Dam, and wasn't even a bird. As the light was fading, and we were standing there quietly shivering, suddenly a couple of African Clawless Otters appeared in the water! We had about 5 minutes of fantastic otter-watching before they disappeared, then reappeared, now in a group of three. Soon they vanished into the reeds, and although the light was not great I managed some alright photographs.