Sunbirds in East Africa

We were back in Kenya just before Christmas and spent time with many of our old friends. One of the delights was the chance to walk in their amazing gardens, where it is almost more difficult to stop plants from growing than it is to cultivate. We found this out many years ago when the sticks planted to support tomato plants grew at about the same rate as those delicious salad suppliers or, when fried, part of a complete breakfast.

Over the years I have had a passion for photographing birds and here I’m going to add a few of sunbirds, the crown jewels that flit about and dip a beak into any bright flower, or the myriad of feeders that some folks hang out. Although sunbirds are not related to the other crown jewels —the humming birds of the Americas—they do fill more or less the same niche.

This is a male bronze sunbird, aka "bronzy". They are usually found at fairly high altitudes. I have seen them most often at anything from 8500 to 7000 feet.

The female bronze sunbird has more defintion than the females of many species.

And this tiny fellow is a collared sunbird, photographed near Gilgil in an orchard. He is one of the smallest members of the family.

This is a male double-collared. He is drinking from the outside of the flower, where there must be some nectar, or else he has speared his beak through the petals. Does anyone know?

And this is the female of the species.

One major difference between hummingbirds and sunbirds is that the latter do not hover, but this one —the variable sunbird— nearly makes it.

This golden-winged sunbird was feeding on aloes near Naro Moru in Kenya. He was one of may that appeared early every morning, having flown down from altitudes of about 9000 feet up the slopes of Mt. Kenya. All I had to do was sit still in amlong the aloes and take my chances.

Double-collared sunbirds also live at fairly high altitudes. This one was in a garden near Timau, at about 8000 feet.

This red-chested sunbird was one of eight species of bird that were in what was almost a feeding frenzy in an Erythrina tree in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park.

The aptly-named Scarlet-chested sunbird was another one that came to that tree.

My final one for today is a picture of a moment I was lucky enough to capture in the life of a a green-headed sunbird male in a garden near Gilgil. He looks as if he is practising for an audition to The Muppets. Gonzo maybe?

Creative Non-Fiction award

Linkhttp://www.paulnicklen.com/, http://www.creativenonfictioncollective.com/index2.php/
Just back from the annual gathering of the Creative Non-Fiction Collective’s meeting at the Banff Centre in Alberta. It’s a fabulous venue for artists of every stripe and we had an invigorating get-together.

One of our events is the Saturday evening social when we select the winner of the CN-FC Reader’s Choice award. Nominators have about two minutes to read a selected passage and then a secret ballot decides the outcome.

The worthy winner was Susan Olding for her essays from Pathologies
(Freehand). The other nominees were

Wade Davis for The Wayfarers (Anansi)
Sharron Proulx-Turner for her essay from Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood
(McGill-Queen’s University Press)
Paul Nicklen for Polar Obsession (Focal Point)
Shawna Lemay for Calm Things (Palimpsest)
Kaitlin Fontana for “The Flight Album” (in The Walrus)
Eufemia Fantetti for “Alphabet Autobiografica" (in Event)

As this blog is mainly about wild things and conservation it will come as no surprise that Polar Obsession caught my ear and eye. Of course one must avoid clichés when possible – like the plague as it were - but this book is more about photographs than text. The text is only used to explain the photos, and these are certainly worth the standard thousand words. Indeed some are worth at least twice as much. It is difficult to choose one passage of four or five paragraphs to read in the space of about two minutes, and I struggled between the account of how Nicklen got the photos of the massed narwhals in Arctic waters and his encounter with the southern ocean’s top predator of penguins, the leopard seal.

I cannot quote at length, even from what I read, but this was what I started with. It came after a brief introduction about how Nicklen had entered the water and stood his ground when challenged by a huge alpha female seal weighing about 500 kg. The seal had offered him a live penguin to eat, but of course he had ignored her, and the bird had escaped.

“I am always reluctant to anthropomorphize an animal’s behaviour, but I could swear that she flashed me a look of disgust as she sped past me to snatch the escaping penguin. I believe that she was trying to feed me penguins because she realized that I was an absolutely useless predator in her ocean, and my ineptness at securing a meal agitated her.”

For lovers of adventure stories about wild things and wild places, or would-be wildlife photographers, this is one to add to the collection.