Deer Park

In our tree

this fellow

announcing himself

This bird is spectacular, in an understated way, and is my favorite bird this year, the Hadada ibis. The other 2 ibis species here are equally beautiful.

There’s a reason I can’t blog the Delta or the wildlife, or even get into it from our postion here on the edge of it. We’re virtually flooded and have been for a while. Story soon.

Eagle and kingfisher together today

Here’s a short video of a bird I’m going to do a special post on when I catch them in action. They’re the MS-13 of the Delta. Here they’re docile and well behaved, probably because they think, at 4 or 5, they don’t have the numbers to rain destruction and misery on the neighbourhood

Because I had doubt about whether this was a yellow weaver because of the eye colour, I whatsappd internationally to a U professor-on-topic lady friend and she didn’t know either, not at all helpful when I have a blog to write! Sooo, after raising this to code red with her, and after a brief slightly knives-out argument about why it was so important (her words), she called a colleague and it’s a Yellow-bellied Greenbul.

A couple actually

Deep in the tree

You remember the gecko stuck to the outside of my windshield riding into town. Here’s a mantis on the inside today

Those eyes are gross

Our tree

I lost focus with the camera, so only short clip of the bird on the left with a fish

And

The fish eagle of the Delta is closely related to the bald eagle from home in Vancouver. They’re both sea eagles in the Haliaeetus family. The fish eagle here is about 40% smaller but is just as beautiful.

Here’s one in the dead tree you’re familiar with from previous pictures and video, early this morning after sunup

Cool video

Here’s how Botswana stands with Covid, below. We get a report twice a week, this is the most recent. Vaccinations started a few days ago with a goal of reaching herd immunity by the end of the year

So a comment last night asked about camera or iPhone.

I ordered this and it eventually arrived. Nikon P950

I’ve seen a couple of them around. The impressive thing is the compact 2000mm telephoto, and the stabilization. For instance this is a handheld moon pic

Not awesome sharp, but pretty good. Very handy for wildlife photography around here which is why I bought it.

So here’s a pic off my deck with no zoom

And in the dead tree on the left, in the pic above, a cormorant at full zoom, which you can barely even see without it

Pretty cool, eh?

Here are more cormorants in the same tree near sundown. Spreading their wings to catch the last of the rays

Then I got the new iPhone SE as my iPhone 5c battery was dead. It’s changed my life: I take pics all the time with it. Here’s a pic from the deck of my favorite pub, which a friend of mine owns

Amazing.

I’ve never really cared for photography and I’m not about to start taking it seriously now. For me there are too many more interesting things to get keen about. But here in the Delta, it’s nice to be able to record certain things.

I’ve resolved to say something interesting about the birds and animals I post here since the previous 1/2 dozen posts haven’t been that interesting. Soooo, here’s the Pied kingfisher. Maun and the Delta are infested with them. It’s far from the most glamorous kingfisher here, but it has pride of place in Carl Linneaus’s 1758 book Systema Naturae. It hovers in place before diving for a target fish. Video taken form my deck in the same dead tree as the cormorant above.

This was an unexpected surprise this morning. It appeared right behind my deck when I was taking other bird pics. A Golden-tailed woodpecker. It’s small, only 4 or 5″ long. It’s also notable for defending a large territory, 10 to 15 hectares.

Because the gold doesn’t show well in the video, here’s a screen grab from another video clip that was out of focus

Go siame

There are 2 species of jacana in the Delta. This is the African jacana