...and it was the dad that gave the secret location of the nest away.
A great scoop to get the Malachite Sunbird (Nectarinia famosa) babies once again.
I saw the dad flying over with a butterfly in his beak, but he was too fast for me to get a shot. Nevertheless, I saw the direction that he was flying in, and I decided to go and do a deep search of the area. After a while the dad popped up from behind a red pincushion bush to sit in a tree above the bush. So, without any further ado, come and let the pictures tell you the story.
Here below you can see the dad in the tree above the bush.
Bingo! And there they were. One at the top and the other one at the bottom. Two new little Malachite babies.
I think that they are about two weeks out of the nest, and we have searched here before, but we could never find the nest.
This is the one at the bottom, and you can see that they are twins.
Most sunbird species can take nectar by hovering like a hummingbird, but usually perch to feed most of the time. As a fairly large sunbird, the malachite sunbird is no exception. They have long thin down-curved bills and brush-tipped tubular tongues, both adaptations to nectar feeding. Some plant species from which malachite sunbirds feed include many Aloe species, such as Aloe broomii, Aloe ferox and Aloe arborescens, and Protea species, such as Protea roupelliae as well as various other bird-pollinated plants such as Leonotis and Strelitzia.
It has been suggested that their behaviour of guarding flowering plants may have led to the selection and evolution of long-tubed flowers that would otherwise tend to be robbed (nectar taken but not pollinated) by short-billed sunbird species.
They can hear when the dad or the mom comes and look how the one at the top waits anxiously for one of the parents that the baby heard.
But as the mom had already fed the one at the top, now it was the baby at the bottom's turn.
So, the one at the top flew down to join the baby at the bottom. Look how cute they are.
After about half an hour, both babies flew up on to the pincushion flowers and they started to feed themselves.
Now you can see how clever the parents were to build their nest in a site that has abundant food for the babies.
I cannot tell you how glad I was to, at last, find the babies, and my wife was equally excited when I waved her over to come and see the babies. Their parents were the babies last season, and as I got photos of the parents as babies, they seem to remember me. So, they know that I don't present any danger to them, as if I did then they would immediately fly away.
NOTE: I have taken many photos of the babies, and I will be sure to share them with you in other posts over time.
I hope you enjoyed the pictures and the story.
Photos by Zac Smith. All-Rights-Reserved.
Camera: Canon PowershotSX70HS Bridge camera.
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