Named for their soft ‘swee swee’ call, the small and colourful Swee waxbills are guaranteed to distract me from my work on their occasional visits to our garden.

If I hear their soft call, I abandon my desk and venture outside with my camera in hand. Currently a small group of five birds come to feed on grass seeds in our winter garden. I am always delighted to see them. The colourful Swee waxbills provide a huge incentive for us to leave patches of grasses to go to seed in the garden so as to attract them and other seed-eating birds. Watching them foraging naturally is indeed a diverting and delightful distraction. Irresistible to me, that is for sure.

Above is a picture of a male Swee waxbill, and below is a picture of a female, when they visited our garden in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa last week.

Swee-Waxbills-female

This post is in response to the Weekly Photo Challenge inviting us to share diversions, distractions and delightful detours. The Swee waxbill is my current “Ooh, shiny!”. To see what distracts and delights other bloggers, click here

Posted by Carol

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