Brazilian advent Day 5

Just as beautiful but doing an amazing job at blending in with the leaves is this Brassy-breasted Tanager

Brazilian advent Day 4

A beautiful male Brazilian Ruby

Brazilian advent Day 3

Brazil has four large toucans and this, the Red-breasted, was the only species I had not yet seen as it is restricted to the south-east.

Brazilian advent Day 2

Of course, this being my first time birding the Atlantic coast, most species were new for me, including this cute White-throated Hummingbird.

Brazilian advent Day 1

This year was the first time I managed to arrange a stopover on the Atlantic coast before heading to the Amazon so, together with a couple of birding friends, I headed up into the mountains for three wonderful days in Itatiaia, the first national park of Brazil.  We stayed in a nearby private reserve, where Diademed Tanagers greeted us and we had a wonderful view of the Atlantic rainforest which provided some spectacular sunsets.

Ice ducks

I should complain about the weather more often as today was a lovely, sunny and calm, although rather cold day as the temperature had dropped to minus 3 degrees overnight.  I thus donned my thermals and spent a couple of hours around the Spuikom in Ostend.  This brackish, man-made lake is linked to the harbour via a system of sluices and a great place for wintering wildfowl.  All five of the European species of grebes were there today; a single Red-necked feeding near the sluices, a very distant Slavonian way out on the centre of the lake it took me an hour and a half to find, a dozen or so Black-necked, plus lots of Great Crested and Little Grebes.  I didn't bother counting the latter two species, turning my attention to the 130+ Cormorants instead, but other birders with more patience tallied 123 Great Crested and 101 Little!  As if the five grebes together weren't incentive enough, there were also several uncommon ducks I don't get to see each year.  Best of all were the three Long-tailed Ducks (or ice ducks as they're called in Dutch) but the supporting cast included 4 Scaup, a female Red-breasted Merganser, at least 20 Goldeneye, and a single, immature Velvet Scoter.

Nasty November

Well, November has been very grey and wet, which is why there has been very little activity on my blog of late.  I only managed two brief birding forays this month, one to my Brussels patch and another in the Sonian Forest, where I'm pretty sure I found a Hume's or Yellow-browed Warbler, but it disappeared off into the forest before I could get a good look at it.  The stream of Siberian Accentors seems to have dried up at a staggering 227 individuals since 4 October and there has also been a considerable influx of Waxwings with a handful of sightings in Brussels, none of which I was able to connect with.  Instead, I have been busy working through my Brazil photo's and ocasionally making some unexpected identifications, such as this Purple-washed Euselasia (Euselasia euoras), which had remained unidentified since 2014.

In a few days, my annual online advent calendar will start again, this year featuring my favourite pictures from my three months in Brazil, so you can expect a lot more butterflies and exotic birds to brighten up the dreary days of December!