Well hi there. I've encouraged Susie to actually blog here - it was her idea originally and I just put it together to "prime the pump", so we'll see if she does.

I have a number of other pix of the shamas and stuff, but I have slowed down shooting them since I already have scads of pix and vid of shamas, and this blog never did acquire a readership. If Susie starts blogging maybe I'll insert pix in her blogs after the fact.

But in summary, as of 11/07/20 we have four shamas still in the yard interacting with us; Bird, Birdlet, Peanut and Fluffy; Peanut being the dominant male chick from the "cutie" fledging and "Fluffy" being the sole chick from the 4th fledging of 2020, a female. They're both in adult plumage now, and to a large extent we tell them apart as much by behavior as by appearance. 

They keep track of each other, and there's often an aerial display of dogfights as they jockey for position if we offer treats. A very definite pecking order as stated above, and various behaviors to out-position one another. All are hand-trained of course; this is necessary since the bulbuls in the yard have learned that we sometimes have mealworms, and if we leave food out the shamas won't get any. The Bulbuls don't have the nerve to come and sit on our hands, but I think it's a staple of shama behavior to hang around larger animals to see what sorts of bugs they disturb, so hanging around humans isn't actually weird behavior for them. 

I'll add a couple of vid links here; the vids are largely out of focus and shot with my somewhat budget cel phone when walking around the yard; and of course un-edited since who has the time? 

But it'll give you a small shot of relatively recent behavior, as of a couple weeks ago or so.

cheers...

DJ

these won't look like much unless you expand them to full screen size.... shot in 1080P though youtube may have toned them down a bit.

Bird sings to a cursing Fluffy -

Various interactions down in the lower yard -