Avadavats

I spent the last week working in Mae Sot.  This allowed for some pre-work birding on three mornings, which was generally rather unproductive given the time.

A couple of nice features however were regular encounters with Horsfield's Bush Larks in song flight, but more spectacularly encounters with a group of Red Avadavats in the grassy filed where I had seen four birds the previous week.  This time I was armed with the camera, and whilst is is very difficult to estimate how many birds were present I feel confident of a minimum count in the range of 15-20 birds.

Unfortuantely none of these were adult breeding males (I think they have already finished breeding as I have seen breeding males with nesting material in early January).  HBW states: "Female is greyish-brown above, rump and uppertail-coverts red with few indistinct white spots, small white or pale buff tips on upperwing-coverts and tertials" and it also states that the female "gives a short song" whilst "Male non-breeding is like female, but with white spots on red uppertail-coverts, larger pale tips on greater coverts". This makes me think that perhaps that perhaps Bird 1 is an adult female - it was singing but the spots on the tertials are rather dull and the uppertail coverts only have a few spots.  I think that birds 2 and 3 are both males.

All images are taken with a Nikon V1 and 300mm f4 lens.

Bird 1 - female in song

Bird 1 - female

Bird 2 - non-breeding male, moulting tertials

Bird 3 - non breeding male