On quiet days, early in the morning it’s great to relax on your porch. Here in the garden surrounding the house there are many tall trees and shrubs on one side, on the other part you will find a slope with tea bushes. It is the ideal biotope for the many birds to find their food here, both on the ground under the leaves and higher up in the trees where fruit and insects fly around. Sometimes the squirrels shout the alarm cry, which means danger in the garden, it could be a mongoose or rat snake, or just a cat, which also attack squirrels. At this time of writing in early March, there are still bird migrants from India, daily the Pita visit several times in search of worms and other insects. This is the third year in a row that this unusual bird has visited our garden. we also recently saw the female Blue Indian Robin scavenging its food. This female form does not have any blue color as the male, but drab brown color with lighter underbelly tending to orange color. Another strange visitor and migrant was the Gray Wagtail, this one I saw for the first time here scurrying under the tea bushes. The birds described above are generally very shy, at any disturbing noise they shoot under the bushes to hide. The Red vented Bulbul does not tolerate other birds in their territory and defend the airspace against intruders, even the bigger brother the crow is not tolerated by them. They are quite busy and noisy birds. The Tickel’s blue is a pretty little bird steel blue with bright orange breast always resting quietly on a wire or twig waiting for a mosquito to fly by. Sometimes you have to be lucky too, the ever shy Black-headed Oriole, was chased by the aforementioned Red Vented Bulbul. He landed about two meters away from me on a branch, and stayed there for a few seconds, just enough for a nice photo.  As previously reported all these shots were taken with the OMSystem OM-1 with the MZuiko 300mm f/4 lens and Teleconverter TC 1.4, Converted for fullframe cameras that is 840mm. This combo delivers very sharp images overall. You have to work with higher ISO values, but with today’s software this is no problem to remove the noise in your images. The only problem I do run into is that you virtually can’t use the Pro capture feature because up or away flying birds both large or small. There is not enough room to get a decent photo when they fly away. The view is usually blocked by wires, thin twig and branches.

Thanks for reading and watching and go outside and enjoy. To be continued in the next episode.