Orange River White-Eye

An Orange River White-eye poses for me in the pepper tree

Last month before I left South Africa I meandered through my garden in the late afternoon. I always have my camera in my hand and while trying to capture a few photos of the Black-Collared Barbet nesting in a tree over my neighbour's wall, I turned around saw an Orange River White-eye in the pepper tree above me. It's not easy to capture these active little birds so I felt singularly blessed to get all these beautiful images that day. These photos can be enlarged for a better effect.

These little birds don't often sit still for long, but this one seemed to be interested in what I was doing!

The Orange River White-eye is a small, greenish warbler with a peachy flank and prominent eye-rings. The eye-rings look as if a human has taken a white marker pen and drawn it around the eye. These birds usually occur in flocks. The one pictured above had probably flown up here from my large garden pond to the left of the photo where whole flocks normally bath and cavort under the waterfall.

They are abundant in woodlands, forests, thickets, plantations and gardens. They have a remarkably loud warbling song uttered mostly at dawn with constant high pitched swizzling calls to each other continuing all day.

Here he's listening to the call of a mate

Once again, he turns to watch me

Now he cocks his head and peers at me almost from under his wing

I managed to take this photo a nano-second before he took flight