Whydahs and Canaries, Oh My!

In the grasslands outside Nelspruit, South Africa, I enjoyed a day birding with my dear friend Peter Lawson. Lantana was running wild in the tangled grasses, and yellow-fronted canaries were feeding on its fruit. Blue is traditionally a bird-attracting color; plants that "want" birds to take their fruit make blue fruit.
No wonder lantana spreads like mad!

Yellow-fronted canary with common waxbill. The waxbills are just after grass seed.

The stars of the show this day were the pin-tailed whydahs. I'd seen whydahs in winter in South Africa, when they look like little brown house sparrows. Nothing prepared me for seeing the males in full summer raiment, breeding plumage.

They chose prominent perches all around the fields, showing off their spectacular tails.

That's a lot of tail for a little finch to carry. Must be some sexual selection at work here. The boys with the longest tails get the most mating opportunities...something like that must be going on.

Here's the little gal who decides how long the tails will get: the female pin-tailed whydah.

Yes, the males are spectacular, but the females are the ones driving the evolution of their wonderful tails. If female birds decide they like long tails and mate preferentially with long-tailed males, Nelly bar the door. Eventually you get a 5" bird with a 15" tail! And the males were dancing like mad, buffeted by a fresh warm breeze, their tails making sinusoidal curves as they danced.

O glory, what a bird. They landed with a flourish on a prominent high perch, letting their tails do their thing in the wind.

I love this shot of a male whydah dancing above a female (hidden in the grass). He's fluttering in one place, and he closes his wings to his body and just hangs in the air between flaps, looking like some kind of crazy wiglet suspended above the grass tops. Bird displays just knock me out. I can only imagine how cool it looks from below.

Resting between dancing bouts.

And a rattling cisticola cheering them on.

Just a Few Birds Around Town ( Nelspruit, S. Africa)

                                        White-fronted bee-eater. Is he not magnificent?

At the start of my trip in February 2012, my dear friend Peter Lawson picked me up at the airport, took me to the lovely Karen Bullen's fabulous home perched on a hillside in Nelspruit, South Africa, then picked me up the next morning for some birding. And oh, what birding we had. These are a few of the birds to be had right around town. This is a white-fronted bee-eater. Oh my gosh. I was OK until I saw the blue panties. Then I lost it. Yes, this is my favorite bee-eater. Until I see a Carmine. Or a European. Gah. Turquoise overload.

They just sit around like any robin in the trees surrounding farm fields and you think, "What would I do if I saw this in my backyard in Ohio?"

This was the great fun of birding in South Africa in its summer. Birds undreamt of. My previous visit had been in the dead of the austral winter, in July 1994. No bee-eaters, very few rollers. They were everywhere this time (in February, South Africa's summer).

Some birds were familiar, like these cattle egrets. Cattle egrets are native right here in South Africa, and have only been in North America since the 1940's. No one knows how they got here, but they've become a familiar fixture from Maine to Florida. They don't mind if they're following elephants or Jerseys. Even cooler, cattle egrets are a bona-fide Neotropical migrant in their new home, tracing new migration routes to Central and South America, routes never taken by their ancestors. I use cattle egrets as one measure of the behavioral plasticity of birds.

Cage bird fanciers will recognize this common waxbill. So cool to see birds you're used to viewing as they ricochet around a parakeet cage, living their good lives out in the wild. I love the red bandit mask.

This is a fan-tailed widowbird, and sharp naturalists will note immediately the resemblance to red-winged blackbirds. No relation at all; red and gold epaulets just happen to look sharp with velvet black, and it's a color combo that translates well in damp well lit grassy landscapes. It's a good example of convergent evolution.

That's not a bird, but it was crawling across our picnic table. I wish we had geckos in Ohio.
We could definitely use more lizards around here.

because then we might have hadedas ( a very noisy kind of ibis) as garden birds. Don't miss the pink iridescence on his wing!

Yes, I dream of living in South Africa!

All photos taken with a Canon 7D fitted with a 70-300 5.6 L series image-stabilized telephoto zoom lens. 

These links go to Columbus' Midwest Photo Exchange, one of the last real family-owned photo stores in Ohio. Sonnie the Canon Guy will take care of you when you're ready for that rig upgrade.