buff-tailed coronet

The right hand bird is clinging to a humming-bird feeder - I think the message is pretty clear!

And a few more pictures with more than one bird today. When providing particularly productive food sources it occasionally happens that birds directly compete for access.

I realized today that I haven't actually uploaded a straightforward side-on flight view of this species, so high time to do that!

And a different species to round off the day - do you think he can get any further into that flower?

And here we have a sense of the whole bird stretching towards the food source.

Here we have the beautiful iridescence.

This is the species that gave us the most visually different photos. With this one I rather like the spread tail showing the bird braking in preparation to approaching the flower.

A few more from this coronet approaching a fuchsia.

This is what happens when your bird is looking for a perch and doesn't worry about your wanting to photograph it feeding from the flower!

There are three species where I still have quite a few good photos to share, and this is one of them. What I find most fascinating about the hummingbird flash photography we carried out is the very many different poses these birds take, usually far too quickly for the human eye to even notice...

Unfortunately the wings are in the wrong position to allow us to see the bird's eye, but I still ike this for the posture - you can see the tongue starting to protrude in anticipation too!

The bird is about to land on the flower, but clearly it's most important to first get one's bill to where the sugar water is!

You can see the green iridescence in quite a spectacular way here - this only appears when the light hits the feathers at a very particular angle.

And another flight shot with the second wing appearing at a slightly odd angle.

Note how the bird seems to be erecting the feathers above the bill, and how abraded the tips of the tail feathers are.

Buff-tailed Coronets were the most common visitor to the feeders involved in our flash photography set-up. I think we didn't give them enough credit at the time, because we didn't see how many great photos they gave us in real time - one needs to be able to look at these on a larger screen to do...

This is what happens when there's overspill when replenishing a flower with sugar water - the birds are certainly clever enough to find the stuff! Buff-tailed Coronets had a decided tendency to sit down to feed rather than to hover. These birds had also learned that it's possible to cling to a...

Here's one of those action shots - the bird had to put on the brakes because some other bird got to the feeder first.

The only hummingbird we saw at both, our previous stop at Guango lodge on the eastern slope and at Tandayapa which is on the western slope of the Andes. Probably the most common hummingbird here, certainly the one most attracted to the feeders we used for our photography sessions. This species...