Olive-backed Oriole Behaviour

G’day everyone,

I watched an Olive-backed Oriole displaying, if that’s the right term, itself yesterday that I hadn’t seen before and was hoping that someone here could offer some opinion as to what exactly the bird was doing.

The bird was perched on a branch in the sun about 1 meter above the ground. The bird would fan out its tail and hold its wing that was facing the sun downwards. It would do this for a short period and occasionally swap sides to repeat the process with the other wing. The bird looked a bit dishevelled, for want of a better word, whilst it was doing this.

At the time I remembered the previous conversations I’ve read here about other birds sunning themselves and thought this maybe what this bird was doing. The bird didn’t look wet so I don’t think it was drying itself out after a bath, but I could be mistaken.

I’ve uploaded an image to here: http://bit.ly/gGRMNe

And you can see a short video of this bird here:

Or alternatively I’ve written put images and video on my blog at http://myoungbirding.blogspot.com/

Any thoughts on what the bird is doing would be much appreciated.

Regards,

Mark

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