Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Scarlet Minivet

Some of you might have heard news about the recent unrest in Thailand caused by the two opposite groups, the red and yellow shirts. Forget about those conflicts, there's a family of forest birds in Thailand called 'minivet' where the male's got bright red plumage and the female's replaced with yellow. I got a chance to photograph these striking Scarlet Minivets (Pericrocotus flammeus) yesterday while I was on a trip to Mae Kam Pong Village with Prof.Mark. A flock of about 10 birds came in with a bird wave and stayed around for about an hour allowing us to grab some shots of them. Although having those striking colours, they are never an easy target since they mostly stay up in the canopy. You can see that in the nature, red and yellow proved to be companions.

Male Scarlet Minivets (Pericrocotus flammeus)

Female birds and juveniles have yellow and grey plymage. The one with some red on its tail and underparts feathers is a young male bird. It will moult into a full black and red plumage later on.

4 comments:

Stuart Price said...

You get scarlet ones, we get boring ashy ones............unfair!

Ayuwat Jearwattanakanok said...

Actually there's Ashy here as well!

Ari said...

Great shots of the minivet, yes they are quite hard to get because of their preference for the upper canopy...

Phil Slade said...

An incredibly coloured bird A. And good shots again for a canopy bird. I think new birders struggle a bit when males and females of a species can look so dissimilar.