Young fantails

Grey Fantails make me happy, I love watching them dance around the sky as they hawk for flying insects.

Grey Fantail (Rhipidura albiscapa) – fledgling
1/1000, f/7.1, ISO 1600

The fledgling Grey Fantail above was waiting to be fed and had some kind of remarkable radar that let it know food was on the way. With its bill open so widely it’s easy to see the rictal bristles spreading out like whiskers from the base of its bill. Science hasn’t confirmed the function of these bristles but several theories have been proposed, including that they help to guide prey into the bill and that they help to protect the bird’s eyes from injury from insects they have captured. It is also possible that the whiskers react to stimulation in the same way as cats’ whiskers which would help birds locate and handle prey.

Grey Fantail (Rhipidura albiscapa)
1/1000, f/5.6, ISO 800

The image above shows an immature bird with a fly in its bill. If I’m watching fantails in a quiet area I can often hear the quiet snap of their bills as they catch their food. Once I watched youngsters learning to hawk, it was comical to see them snapping their bills in mid air and missing the insects.

Grey Fantail (Rhipidura albiscapa)
1/800, f/5.6, ISO 800

Grey Fantails are about 15cm in length and they weigh about 9g.

Grey Fantail (Rhipidura albiscapa) – fledgling
1/1250, f/5.6, ISO 800

Juvenile Grey Fantails are brown and buff, rather than grey and white. Their warm colouring is striking, and beautiful. The juvenile in the image above showed so many of its feather features, the white throat is starting to appear, the eyebrow is russety rather than white and soft downy feathers are visible against the background of the landing twig.

Happy birding

Kim

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