More birds!

Now some more bird photos.

Birds became my main interest this season in Gambia.


Here are some nice shots:

First, the Green dove that is really amazing. We had a pair of them now and then in the big Parinari (wild plum) tree, eating fruit.

Here is a pair of them. Almost looks like one single bird with a head in both ends, haha.... 

Next comes two photos of the grey-billed hornbill. Frequent, almost abundant guest on the plot, always noisy. Our gardener/watcman Wie does not like them at all, they destroy a lot of his farm products in the rainy season; corn, ground nuts and millet. 

It's not often we see raptors in our garden. This rare visitor is a Shikra. It stood at the bird pond one hot afternoon, I saw it through the kitchen window. It drank and then stood resting on one leg a long while. My Bird guide book says it favours garden pools. Good to know! Nice stripes on its belly! 

The Yellow-billed shrike again. They are very common. Another photo of it in the previous blog post. 

Now two pictures of  the greater blue-eared glossy starling that is less common than the long tailed one which comes next. The first picture is one of my favourites from the whole season 2011-2012. The shiny back shows well in this position. The whole bird is metallic, shining in many ways in different angles of light. 

And the other one of the same bird: 

Then two photos of the long-tailed glossy starling, the favourite of both Börje and me. They are always many in the garden, and on the whole plot. Noisy chatting birds in large groups. Shining metallic blue and dark green all over. 

More next time - probably photos from the beach. Cheers for BIRDS! 

See also the previous post, there are some more birds. 

2012 - First birds

First bird pics!
The birds in this post are the absolutely most common birds on our plot in Tujereng. We see lots of them every day. More bird photos will come sooner or later.

First;  Village weaver, always shredding our oil palms!!

A shrike:

Long tailed glossy starling:

A squirrel at the bird pool: Everybody needs water!

Common bulbul:

Laughing dove,always in pairs:

Red billed hornbill, very common:

My Beloved Great Fig!

This big fig tree supriced us this year. It gave thousands of fruit, but the fruiting season was very short, only two weeks or so from when they started to ripen. Then all of them had fallen on the gound, or eaten by birds.

The tree gave us the most fabulous opportunities to bird watching. The most beautiful Gambian birds visited it, eating figs. Next year I will take a good camera with me, and hope the spectacle will appear again.

I collected figs (with my sister Pirkko who is in the pictures), but they were not particularly tasty. I  cooked jam with sugar, and it was better.

Half of the ripe fruit were full of insects so I had to throw them away. Close up of the funny long tailed flies (or ants, or something in between ;-)) comes first! I laughed... it was like cleaning mushrooms, sometimes half of them are full of insects as well. Even the texture of the fruit flesh reminded me of familiar Swedish mushrooms (Boletus Edulis).

Piliostigma thonningii (most likely), a Bauhinia lookalike

 Updated Tuesday, June 21st

Barry helped me with the identification. This is really not a Bauhinia at all, but a relative, which seems to have small white flowers, not the orchid-like, colourful ones that most Bauhinias have. This was a slight disappointment; I don't have an orchid tree.
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I never saw this beautiful individual of Bauhinia in bloom, so I don't know which colour the flowers are. This is a very common tree in our area, we have tens of them growing wild on our plot.

 I asked one "neighbour" 3 kms away who also has many of them. He said the flowers are not particularly beautiful, something yellowish-brown, he said. Probably in the wild in Gambia there is only one species of the tree, so it might be the same as I have.

Long seed pods (Bignoniaceae)

Updated Tuesday 21st June.
The identification Bignoniaceae comes from Barry Stock.
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This grows by the way to the beach, very near our house, in a wild forest. Common-looking leaves, bushy way of growth, very long seed pods - 60-70 cm. They were all unripe January-March, so no seeds collected. No flowers either at that time.

Noni - Morinda citrifolia

Updated Tuesday, June 21st
I did not know this tree. Barry Stock helped me with th identification. Thank you! It is the famous Noni from the South Pacific, especially Tahiti. The juice from the fruit is sold as miraculous vitamine drink - very expensive!!
http://www.tahitinonijuice.info/
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This one grows on our plot. Only one of them. The branches are slender and long, hanging down slightly.

What can it be. Most of the local people we know did not have any name for it.  One man remembered a local name, but I lost it. He said it has cultural use; The branches are cut and used to symbolically "chase" groups of boys when they are on their way to circumsicion. He said the fruit will get yellow when ripe. They are not eaten in Gambia.

The tree had many unripe fruits, flowers and flower buds at the same time. The fruit apparently needs long time to ripen. I saw no change of colour in three months.

Terminalia macroptera - a common tree in our area

Updated Tuesday 21st June: Identified!!! Terminalia macroptera. Thanks, Barry!
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Barry is getting seeds from this one, labelled "The most common tree in our area". No ID. The pictures are limited, no whole tree. I will search in my messy folders if I find some more to add to this one, from previous years.

The stem in the second picture is covered with termite "shelter" so it's for no use.