Tag: Tim Melling

Tim writes: the Golden Takin is a rare mammal that inhabits the same mountainous bamboo thicket forests as Giant Panda.  There are four subspecies and this is the form that lives in Sichuan  (Budorcas taxicolor tibetana) with more blotchy flanks than the true Golden Takin (B.t.bedfordi) from Shaanxi, NW China.  The remaining two subspecies are…

Tim writes: Photo-opportunities of perched Merlins are few and far between.  So I could hardly believe my luck when I spotted one on a roadside post some distance ahead.  I took a few record shots then inched closer in the car until it was only about 25m away.  It then turned its head and made…

  Tim writes: Well I normally like to isolate my photographic subjects but this perch wasn’t quite what I had in mind for my first Siberian Meadow Bunting (Emberiza cioides), which is usually now known simply as Meadow Bunting.  I have long been fascinated by this species which was illustrated in Thorburn’s Birds as it…

Tim writes: This will be a familiar bird to anyone who has spent time near a river in SE Asia.  They are noisy, bold, and very photogenic.  They were once placed in a genus (Chaimarrornis) but molecular studies have shown it is definitely a typical redstart, in the same genus as our two  British species. …

This is the same species of Dipper that occurs in Britain but is of the Tibetan and Chinese subspecies Przewalski.  I posted it for interest because it does look subtly different from European Dippers.  This one has a wholly dark belly, lacking the brighter orange band that we have on British Dippers..  I’m finding it…