The fruit of all that hole-drilling, chasing off parrotlets and food-collecting finally popped its head out of the nest of the Yellow-fronted Woodpeckers this week. A single chick is calling hungrily all day from one of the bigger holes in the dead stump just behind our barbecue area, and the parents return regularly after pecking around for food on nearby branches. As you can see from the picture below, the fledgling already has a slightly dusty version of the adult bright colouring, including the beginnings of the red crown which identifies the male.
The woodpeckers are among a number of bird species that can be observed at very close quarters from the house at the moment. Another is the Yellow-lored Tody-flycatcher, (Todirostrum poliocephalum), a beautiful little bird which hops busily around the leaves just below the canopy, giving its loud teque-teque call which provides the Portuguese name. Fortunately the balcony from our upstairs bedrooms looks directly into the crown of one of the "Sun Hat" or Indian Almond trees (Terminalia catappa) planted next to the house for shade. That allows us to watch canopy birds like this from eye-level and sometimes within a couple of metres.
A couple of interesting sights from my walk to the river this morning. First, these weird and beautiful fungi appeared suddenly on some fallen branches near the riverbank. Seeing the variety of fungi which spring up all over the forest helps you to realise the importance of rotting debris in the biodiversity of the ecosystem.
A point also made by these bright orange wood-beetles which had invaded a stump along the trail near the riverbank. There has been some extremely heavy rain recently in dramatic January thunderstorms, and perhaps this has brought out more of these creepy-crawlies.
By the river itself this morning, I got out my recorder and camera to get sounds and images of this Social Flycatcher (Miyozetetes similis), a common enough bird but for some reason not yet on my species records. As I was recording a Green Ibis flew over and landed in some high branches just upstream - you can hear its "corro corro" call approaching along side the thin whistle of the flycatcher.
