Regular readers of this blog may recall my previous post about our olive-backed sunbirds. Well, they’re back. Or at least they where.
We arrived back from Bhutan to see a new nest in progress. As you can see, the sunbirds are incorporating the latest technology into their nest, pink plstic raffia and sickytape. Our craftsman is below, cunningly out of focus.
Here’s a 360 to give an idea of the construction environment. The keen-eyed will notice bamboo scaffolding.
Looks like it wasn’t only the sunbirds constructing. The painters were in and they were peeking through my windows for almost two months. Here’s a video of the bird at work. The painters also build their structures from plastic raffia and Mrs Bird is doing her best to take it down.
Here’s a shorter video of the build process.
Eventually the structure was complete. It’s a deep nest and has a little porch to keep the weather out.
Not a bad construction but empty for now as the male (iridescent blue bib) and the female (no bib) would drop by now and again but no nesting. They were probably fattening themselves up and gestating until…
When Mrs Bird is on the nest we can’t go on the balcony because she will get spooked and fly away. Sometimes she would get frightened even when we were in the house during the daytime but would settle down at night.
It was a few weeks on the nest without much going on. Then we noticed that she was going out, coming back and feeding, before sitting on the nest again. Until one day…
A chick. I think they have nested here twice before but this is the first sucessfull brood I have seen. Bit of an ugly duckling for now.
I managed to get a few decent shots of our new flatmate but it;s tough through the window. Sadly, it only lasted a few days before some much bigger gray birds started hanging around and I assume they ate the chick because he was nowhere to be seen. Stuck my finger in the nest and all.
Eventually the nest decayed and fell off the washing line, so I stuck it on the cactus in case they want to reuse the material. The funny thing is that they still hang out, they come and make noise, probably knowing that they need to be there but forgetting why. Surprisingly the big birds hang out too, poking their head into the old nest.
So that’s another season of the sunbirds nesting on the balcony. It is a joy to have them around and tragedy to see them fail. These creatures are the size of my thumb, some of the smallest birds about and it’s really heartbreaking to see things end this way but that’s how things go. Hoping to see them back, I think they nest twice a year.