Olive Backed Sunbirds

A couple of these have been hanging out on the washing line.

Olive Backed Sunbirds

I had a look in Birds of Thailand but wasn’t able to decide if these were sunbirds or spiderhunters. The trouble is that the sunbird males have a blue bib.

Sunbird or Spiderhunter?

It turns out we were looking at a pair of females. Confusion was cleared when a male turned up. He performed a brief courtship dance and flew off with one of the females. Then this appeared.

Sunbirds build a hanging nest out of spiderwebs and, in this case at least, plastic raffia.

The nest is complete now but I’ll need to take some more photographs. Sorry about the poor quality of the shots but I’m shooting through flyscreen and the birds don’t seem to want to work when it’s sunny.

Now the nest has finished they’ve gone off somewhere for what I read is a week. Probably fattening up before spending all day sitting on the eggs.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *