Flights of Fancy: Photographing Sunbirds at Kirstenbosch

I'm fortunate to live very close to Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, and over the past few weeks I've taken the kids and my camera for quite a few walks through parts of the garden. Now kids' noise and patience levels aren't usually recommended ingredients for successful bird photography, but despite that I've managed a few pleasing shots recently. I'll hopefully get around to posting more of them in due course but for today I'm only including sunbirds in this post, because they're probably the most frustrating of the birds I've photographed recently.

So, let us examine sunbirds' crimes against photography:

For starters, they're pretty hyperactive little blighters and spend far too much time flitting from bush to bush in search of the next snack.
Most species are quite protective of their territory, so birds of both genders are easily distracted by the need to chase off competing birds.
When they do sit on the same perch for more than a few seconds at a time, they tend to hide their faces in flowers a lot, and generally devote much too little time to posing co-operatively against distant, neutrally coloured backgrounds.
Then there's that gaudy iridescent plumage of theirs that makes them so attractive to look at, but a nightmare to expose correctly: there's a fine line between shiny and blown highlights.
Next, there's the little matter of their not so little bills. Side on, they have the potential to lend a graceful and attractive curve to a picture, but a sunbird that's facing you is likely to look silly even if you do miraculously manage to keep both head and bill in focus.

OK, so their crimes are numerous and heinous, right? Maybe we should just ignore them and never photograph them! Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to do that, so I keep going back for more frustration. Here are some pics from yesterday and two weeks ago, none of which is quite good enough for me, so I guess I'm condemned to continuing the quest for better sunbird photos.

First up, the Southern Double-Collared Sunbird. I was going to post just one of these, but I couldn't decide on my favourite. I'd appreciate your input on which you prefer, and why. Hint: See down below where it says "0 comments"? Click that and make the number bigger!

SD-CS #1

SD-CS #2

SD-CS #3

And now for the even more frustrating Orange-breasted Sunbird, probably the gaudiest and most beautiful of our sunbirds. They seem to prefer the Erica gardens which are quite far up the hill at Kirstenbosch, so the kids tend to be bored and wanting to go home by the time we find our first Orange-breasted Sunbirds and that means I haven't had much quality time with them...