Contributor
Date
Location
- Age and sex
- Adult Male - X
Observation details
At 11.8613, 125.2089. Near campsite with blue tarpaulin. Seen for perhaps 5 or 10 minutes between 7am and 7.20am. Feeding in upper branches of not very tall trees along top of ridgeline. Very active, but not manic, quite possible to follow with camera well enough to get photos unlike (often) flowerpeckers and sunbirds. May have made soft calls, but didn't listen since concentrating on taking photos.
Flight between trees notably slow and laboured compared to flowerpeckers and sunbirds.
Associated with feeding flock. Came in and left at around same time as feeding flock, but not travelling from tree to tree with other species of bird. Tended to stay in same tree and sometimes part of tree as each other, or tend to follow one another in visiting parts of tree.
Was trying to identify birds in good feeding flock coming up onto ridge. Puzzled briefly when maybe 5m above my head I got onto a very small bird mostly bright yellow below (white lower belly and lower) with completely straight, medium-short, thin pointed black bill. Bill unlike any flowerpeckers or sunbirds. Until it looked down and I saw a thin light brown-green line between bill and eye continuing straight behind eye to meet or nearly meet similarly colored crown, forming eyebrow, bright yellow same as most of underparts. And at the same time noticed sparse unfeathered pale plumes sticking out a short way behind wings roughly level with base of tail. A male Visayan Miniature Babbler! I could hardly believe it and frantically started taking id shots. I had been inquiring about visiting Mt Haraw? on a 4+ day trip to take place during a future return visit to the Philippines, since I thought I would only get a chance at Visayan Miniature Babbler by doing something like that. Actually glad now that yesterday I didn't notice (until too late) the Mindanao Bleeding-heart that was completely in the open 6m away from me for at least 10 seconds... behind my back.
The altitude here is less than 200m, didn't think the M. Babbler would occur that low, since Mindanao M. Babbler is a mid altitude species, lowest altitude 670m, according to Kennedy. Maybe it could have occurred lower down once, but all the lower spots it liked got deforested?
Tentative: Adult male, adult female, juvenile. I think at least 3 birds based on photos, only ever saw 2 at one time.
Technical information
- Model
- Canon EOS 7D
- ISO
- 800
- Focal length
- 420 mm
- Flash
- Flash did not fire, auto
- f-stop
- f/5.6
- Shutter speed
- 1/500 sec
- Dimensions
- 315 pixels x 257 pixels
- Original file size
- 63.96 KB