Sabah birding (3) : Photo essay on Leaf Birds

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When: July 2023 Weather : Hot and wet 30C

Nikon 900P, Nikon P950, Leica Q3

When at a famed birding location, one is tempted to head straight to the forested areas to bird but I’ve found over the years that adjacent carparks or the hotel/resort gardens yield many interesting birds too……so it was at My Nature resort where right next to the dining room, there was a fruiting tree about 3m tall with many birds flying around…many of them green. Leaf birds galore! I’d only ever had distant fleeting glimpses of leaf birds which as their name indicates have the same colour as leaves making them hard to photograph. So this tree which attracted the Leaf birds in numbers allowed me to get enough pictures of them to do this detailed photo essay….only leaf birds though….

The small nondescript 3-4m tall tree near the dining room where there was lots of leaf bird action…my breakfasts kept being interrupted by the sight of leaf birds and flower peckers flitting in an out.

I got so many pictures of the Green Leafbirds that I was able to look at them and scrutinise the differences between greater and lesser green leafbirds, male and female. It’s often said that the Greater LB is larger than the Lesser LB but the difference is only a couple of cm and its hard to differentiate based on size alone.

First, the male Greater Green LB (Chloropsis sonnerati), slightly larger with a heavier beak and in which the black face patch extends above the eye….

The male Greater Green LB, in which the black face patch extends above the eye
Greater green LB with berry

Greater Green LB with flattened berry

And now the female Greater Green LB, typified by a yellowish eye ring and yellow throat….

Female Greater Green LB with definite yellow eye ring and yellow throat
Female Grater Green LB again with yellow eye ring and clearer view of yellow throat
Female GGLB with less yellow eye ring

Now the female Lesser Green Leafbird which does not have the yellow eye ring nor the yellow throat but just looks green all over….

Female Lesser Green LB..largely green all over without yellow eye ring
Female lesser green LB
Female lesser green LB

And finally the male Lesser Green Leafbird….slightly smaller than the male Greater Green LB, the black face patch does not extend above the eye and the beak is a little slimmer….the Lesser GLB was much the commoner bird seen and the way they eat the berries from the tree is fascinating and will be seen in this sequence of pictures….

Male lesser green LB where black eye patch does not go above the eye..there is also a hint of yellow at the edge of the black patch
male lesser green LB with the slimmer beak

And here’s the sequence of male LGLB showing how he eats berries….

First he picks the berry up by impaling his upper beak into the fruit whilst the lower beak supports the berry
He starts squeezing..
and the berry gets smaller
another bird shows the fruit being crushed…in this case the upper beak is bearing down on the lower beak which impales the fruit
the berry is finally flattened, all the juices and pulp having been swallowed….
And having consumed the contents of the berry, he spat the skin out and posed…

So that’s it….a detailed pictorial study of the Green Leafbirds seen in abundance here in My Nature resort, Sepilok. Apart from this tree, there were a couple of other trees next to the swimming pool which also had a number of leafbirds.

So if are interested in Leafbirds, come to this corner of Sabah!

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