I got waylaid en route by a colony of House Swifts breeding below the bridge over one of the arms of the KKB Reservoir. Give me eye-level views of swifts and I can quite happily waste hours trying to get that perfect shot - it's an addictive pass-time!
All birds photographed were adults, and all seemed at an identical stage of moult, with fresh tail feathers and inner primaries. Many were carrying feathers and bits of straw, so were presumably gearing up for breeding.
There's always one that just has to be BETTER than all the others!
I've not managed to photograph the iris colour of a House Swift in flight before!
There were a couple of swiflets too. I felt these were darker and greyer than the usual Germain's, with a subtly different jizz, looking long, sharp-winged. Possibly the nominate race of Black-nest?
Wow these shots are amazing!
ReplyDeleteI've never got such sharp shots of swifts in flight before. The second one is just stunning!
Thanks Ayuwat. You will never see the 100s of other shots of blurred birds, half birds and no birds!
ReplyDeletevery interesting shot of the swiftlet, just during last Friday, very moody day probably forcing insects to fly very low and various swallows and swiftlets were nearly touching the ground as the fly, giving me a good number of rump views (no camera, dont even bother as my FZ-100 wont do any good on such speed of flight), I notice some of them have pretty pale grey rumps but at least 1-2 have very slight pale on the rump, very much like the one you show here, I dont have enough time to check wings as they are very quick occurring left and right as I walked through the group, some had to make emergency U-turns to avoid crashing into me and I too automatically duck or avoid as they fly close to me.
ReplyDeleteGreat shots of the House Swifts. I am still waiting for a chance to shoot them.
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