Colourful cousins

Little did I expect to be adding another new species to my lifelist so soon after returning from Ghana, but this Booted Warbler, one of the few European species I'd still not seen, was found in Zeebrugge on Tuesday so I made a beeline for the coast the following day and saw it really well, with a nice Yellow-browed Warbler as an added bonus.  This made up for the horribly long, wasted journey to Drenthe (NL), the previous day to try and see the Yellow-browed Bunting, which had disappeared.

On Friday, I spent the morning on my Brussels patch, finding a record 56 species, including 4 migrating Woodlarks.  This male Red-crested Pochard, one of two there, was sitting on the same log as a female Common Pochard, which made for a nice picture.

Picathartes!

This time last week, I was watching a Black Sparrowhawk in Atewa Forest, on the final day of a 17-day birding tour of Ghana, organised and guided by Kalu Afasi of Malimbe Tours.  Appropriately, we got to see all four of the Ghanaian malimbes, which are red and black, forest-dwelling members of the weaver family, but the main target bird of any trip to Ghana is the White-necked Rockfowl, aka Yellow-headed Picathartes or the bird that time forgot.  Seeing a picathartes means a long hike through the forest to their nesting/roosting boulder and then sitting and waiting for them to arrive, usually late in the afternoon and just as it is getting dark.  We only had to wait about half an hour for the first one to appear but that didn't stay for long, then two birds appeared just as the heavens opened.  Having gotten satisfying looks at them and a couple of grainy pictures with what little light remained, we got up and sheltered under the boulder from the pouring rain.  One of the picathartes then hopped onto the viewing bench and sat there watching us in a surreal, tables turned situation!

The sparrowhawk was the final and 190th new bird of the trip, during which I saw a total of 347 species and heard another 23.  The main focus was on seeing as many species as possible so I didn't take many photo's but will be posting some of them during December in my yearly online advent calendar.