Carrying forward the Tiny bird series - the Yellow-bellied Fantail

Two things happened since my last update - Firstly, I have travelled and did some fabulous but not so easy, the difficult kind of birdwatching. Well, that update will take some time to happen. Secondly, The blog was selected by Feedspot as one of the top birding blogs in the world, eightieth to be precise. The  So I planned to carry on with the bird series - in continuation to the one I did in my last post - the tiny little bundle of joys. 

Today I discuss a tiny little fantail. Well, it is common and common like hell - if I am permitted to say so. The bird inhabits the part of the country where I reside - that is the North India tucked into the laps of Himalayas. It does some half-hearted migration from lower Himalayas to little higher, ranging from about 1,000m to highest at 4,000m. In South-east Asia, it has been seen locally down to about 180m. The bird is a beautiful mixture of Yellow and greyish-olive and is a tiny 11.5 cm to 12.5 cm. Tiny when compared with the other fantails of India - ranging from 18 to 20 cm.

Being tiny - it has a diet that is based upon small flying insects that are flushed out by fluttering about among the foliage. It occasionally forms part of the mixed hunting flocks but I have often seen that the hunting flocks moves along and these birds get left behind perching and hunting from their spot. I have spotted this bird in almost its entire range in Indian Himalayas, Hills of Shimla, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland.

The beautiful and the tiny Yellow-bellied Fantail...

The habit of sallying back to the same branch can give you some good views and pictures of this tiny bird...

The fairly large range of this tiny bird...

The eBird almost bunked my report where I saw more than 20 birds together last month in Nagaland. The birds seemed part of a larger hunting flock that got separated as these birds decided to let go others and settled to hunt near a small stream. The bird song is as embedded below and I find it difficult to differentiate from the so many other small birds.