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Geoffrey Dabb has made an interesting off-group comment about my assumption
it was a juvenile Crested Shrike-tit that I saw apparently taking food from a
Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike at Oura beach. Viz:
"they seem to be consistently late nesters, not starting around here until
November. From the books, I would think the earliest the female starts to
build the elaborate nest would be in August. Therefore your juvenile would
probably be a late fledger – maybe in Jan or Feb, so the parents might have been
a bit tired of it by now. They do seem to carry on for some time with that
wing-quivering stuff, I suppose because the feeding technique is quite difficult
to master."
Accordingly, John Layton makes mental note to study the text in future, no
matter how familiar he believes he may be with a species, rather than merely
pouring over the pretty mug shots in his bird books prior to pronouncing the
stage the bird has reached.
John K. Layton
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