guango

And a lovely flower. Sorry - I'm not much of a botanist.

I just add this photo to indicate that if the light falls at just the right angle one can get pretty crazy colours from hummingbirds.

I just love these coronets - they posed so nicely for me. I hope people won't think this is overkill.

This is an adult male.

Another fairly common hummingbird at Guango, but one I didn't get many pictures of. These birds tended to hide away and typically weren't all that easy to spot. This is an immature.

I know I'm giving you three portraits which are fairly similar, but I really like each one of them a lot. This one shows how the iridescence can outline the head feathers in quite a strong way.

Here we have the bird at rest. These hummingbirds are reasonably bold and they do sit in the (comparative) open quite frequently. The buff wing patched is also visible with the wing closed, and here we can also see the malar stripe.

One of the problems with flight shots of hummingbirds is that they can move faster than the camera's autofocus. Although technically far from good I still like this photo because of the sense of dynamic action it conveys.

I'll spend a few days going through the main species of hummingbird that one may see at Guango. Today we have the Buff-winged Starfrontlet, a fairly common species there. The buff coloured patch on the wings is the feature that gives the bird its name, and it has one of the longer and stouter bills.

We had a trial of the flash set-up provided by the tour operator, but didn't persist with it because the wet cool weather wasn't really very conducive to hummingbird activity. You can see in this picture that Collared Incas aren't actually black when the light falls on them in the right way.

And another photo because I really enjoyed this bird.

We weren't very lucky with the weather at Guango. We went for a short walk because the hummingbird feeders weren't that busy, and were really lucky to come across this beauty.

A companion piece to the previous photo - I like in this one how the wings appear in a blur.

Anybody who has ever tried hummingbird photography will know that getting pictures while the birds are moving is challenging, unless one has a special setup (of which more later). This was just a lucky one - the bird stopped in the air before homing in on a feeder.

Classic male.

But the male was a different matter!

This is one of the habituated pair that on and off frequents the lodge parking lot at Guango. See more of my birding experiences at LOST IN BIRDING http://www.samwoodsbirding.blogspot.com