During one of our early morning birding trips on the outskirts of Bangalore, we noticed a few tiny yellow crowned birds darting amongst a reed bed in the middle of a small roadside pond. I instantly recognized them as the Streaked Weaver, a widespread resident of India, however not as common as the Baya Weaver.
We decided to wait by the pond and see if we could get some photographs of these yellow-crowned beauties. While watching them, we observed that they were carrying thin strands of reed leaves towards the far side of the pond, away from the road. We parked the car by the roadside, and went around to investigate, and were pleasantly surprised to see that the Weavers were building a colony of nests! We rushed back to the car, picked up the camera plus tripod setup, and went and parked ourselves on the bank of the pond, away from the road.
Even though the nests were in the middle of the pond, atleast 25-30 feet from the nearest bank, the birds were cagey and hid in the middle of the reef bed for about 30 minutes or so. We waited, and were rewarded when they slowly got back to building their nest when they realized that we weren’t a threat. Our camera was set and in the next 30 minutes we were fortunate to have observed some incredible behavior of this tiny (14 cm) hard working species.
Here are a series of images taken with my trusted D300, 300mm f2.8 lens plus the 2x TC mounted on a manfrotto tripod, with Wimberley head II.
