A Surreal Experience

One of the absolute joys of camping for me is seeing something unexpected, learning about a new-to-me species, or just admiring a creature sharing my space for that moment.

Seeing the Rainbow Bee-eater at the Ginty’s lookout campsite was one of those special encounters. Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, but it really was magical.

Flashes of bright green and brown and black with distinctive orangey-brown wings that have a really interesting shape when flying, made a perfectly surreal moment when they turned up to keep us company that afternoon and into sunset at a location with a pretty amazing view.

These gorgeous colourful birds, bright green and yellow with a hint of teal and a black mask around their eyes, long black tails streamers turned up and were flitting around the campsite for a while. Scott’s instagram post has some of the best photos and videos we got.

The Birds

This bird, is the only bee-eater in Australia although the Bird Guide does say that the Blue-Tailed Bee-eater (Merops phillipinus) has been ‘‘long expected in our region but not yet recorded”. The fact that it is potentially the only bee-eater here, makes it feel more special (although it shouldn’t).

Neither Scott nor I had seen (or at least noticed) these birds before but they are supposedly widespread across Australia, except Tasmania and other off-shore islands.

Their beaks are long and curved, which are clearly well suited to catching insects. We spent a good amount of time just watching them catch insects, and smash them against trees for their feed.

It is hard to describe the shape of their wings as they fly - it is not a pattern I’ve noticed on another bird, so I’m going to let the illustrations from the Australian Bird Guide show them instead.

The underside of their wings really fascinated me. In person, similar to the above illustrations, the feathers appeared very well-defined, like like black lines had been drawn to separate them. They did look very much like illustrations in flight.

Juvenile?

There was one very dull grey-brown bird among them, which I thought might be a female, but having looked them up (see above illustration from the Australian Bird Guide), apparently the females of the species are similarly coloured to the males.

Juveniles are supposedly duller. In the illustration in the bird guide, they still have a good amount of colour though, so perhaps this was a different type of bird?

Looking back at the couple of photos we got of it, it looked too similar in shape to the rainbow bee-eater, and there weren't any other similarly shaped birds that this one could have been.

The descriptions in the Australian Bird Guide and on BirdLife say the juveniles are not only duller in colour, but they don’t have the black band around the chest (check) or the tail streamers (check).

In person, the dull grey-brown bird did have more hints of green than turned up in the photos. Given the above, my bet for the moment is that it was a juvenile.

Sketching

The underside of their wings really made me want to sketch them on-site, but with deteriorating light, a lack of cooperation on their part, and the fact that the illustrations in the Bird guide already captured well-enough what I wanted to remember, I decided to just spend some time watching them, then sketching the stunning view.

I finally got around to doing a sketch of the birds while we’ve been in Darwin, and gouache seemed like the perfect medium for them with its vibrant, solid, bright colours. That and well, I’m really loving gouache at the moment.

It is by no means fully accurate, but for a first attempt and a relatively quick page in my sketchbook, I love it.

Going Forward

I’m looking forward to doing a few more paintings and sketches of them, but the list of creatures we saw along the way that I have yet to sketch is still long. For now this page makes me happy and reminds me of the joy of watching these birds that day (and trying to capture them with our camera - they weren’t staying still for very long).

Gouache Colours used:

• Winsor and Newton Yellow Ochre PY 42

• Winsor and Newton Oxide of Chromium PG 17

• Winsor and Newton Cobalt Turquoise Light PG 50

• Schmincke Horadam Cadmium Yellow Hue PY 154

• Holbein Ivory Black PBk 6

• Holbein Primary Black PBk 7