Backyard birds in Lilongwe, Malawi

Anne and I finally do have good connectivity, so I can now start to show you some of the sights we’ve seen over the past 10 days. Our first stop was Lilongwe, in central Malawi, where I hung out in the backyard of the guest house in which we were staying while Anne traveled to a nearby sight to kick off her research project.

This first handsome character is a common bulbul (Pycnonotus barbatus) who stayed with me for most of the day and seemed to be fond of singing.

This next dashing bird, a fork-tailed drongo (Dicrurus adsimilis), visited nearly as much as the bulbul, and would often swoop down to the lawn below to fetch a small worm and bring it back to the wire to eat it.

Meanwhile, down on the lawn, a pair of Eurasian hoopoes (Upupa epops) would vigorously march around and stuff that long beak into cracks in the baked-dry soil to probe for their meals.

Once in a while, one of them would find something exciting enough to make its head feathers stand on end as it ran over to show or deliver what it had found to the other.

As often seems to be the case, the larger birds are much shyer than their little cousins, and there was a pair of Schalow’s turacos (Tauraco schalowi), of which this is one, who would make a huge racket in a tall tree at the edge of the yard right up until I tried catching a glimpse of them. Then they would quiet right down, try to hide in the foliage, or just flee the scene altogether. I was thrilled to get at least this image to show you.

I only saw this visitor, a laughing dove (Spilopelia senegalensis), once or twice so I was also thrilled to capture an image of it, especially in some nice sunlight to show off the subtle colors in its feathers.

One big surprise, not just in Lilongwe but also in the rest of Africa we visited, was the ubiquity of pied crows (Corvus albus). In the late afternoon, I could often estimate crowds of a couple dozen birds playing in the wind high in the air. If you look closely at that beak, you might be thinking “raven”, and you wouldn’t be far off because the Pedia of Wik reports that “structurally, the pied crow is better thought of as a small crow-sized raven, … and it may be a modern link (along with the Somali crow) between the Eurasian crows and the common raven.”

Another resident of the backyard, and I bird I could often hear, if not necessarily see, was this southern masked weaver (Ploceus velatus). His song sure was distinctive, if not necessarily entirely melodic.

Lastly, for the bandwidth I have today, here’s a little blue waxbill (Uraeginthus angolensis) aka southern cordon-bleu down on the lawn with the hoopoes, doves, and occasional drongos.