Apparently, the

CRIMSON SUNBIRD

is very common in the area where I had been with my group of women birders over last week.

But for me, it was a beautiful new bird, and rather than the fleeting fraction-of-a-second glimpses of other birds that I got (most unsatisfactory) during the trip, I was able to watch these birds for quite a while, over two mornings’ worth of observation.

Here’s my first shot of one, sitting at the edge of a Tent Web:

Here are two shots of the beauties, sipping nectar from the flowers in the garden of Ivy Lodge, the gracious and beautiful home of the Grewals, where we stayed:

Here, you can see the crimson that gives the bird its name:

I like this kind of relaxed, let-the-birds-be-seen birding rather than the intense, go-peering-into-the-undergrowth, crick-your-neck-looking-up-into-the-foliage, and strain-your-eyes-looking-into-scopes-and-binoculars-into-the-far-distance kind of birding….These often yield only fleeting glimpses of black silhouettes and vague shapes, which I have to repeatedly ask expert birders the id of, and which (because I’ve not seen or observed them properly) remain only ill-recollected names to me, tick marks on my birding list…..I realize that I will never be even CLOSE to an expert birder, because I can never have a “tick list” of birds (the only time I do it is during the Bird Race, and I don’t like it much!)

I am posting some of the birds I shot, on my Facebook album…

click here

to see them, I will be adding to them over the next few days.