Leopard from BR Hills (click on image for bigger version) After more than a year, I finally had an excellent sighting of a leopard and that too at my home forest of BR hills. We got there on saturday evening and got to see one for 20 min right outside the park. On sunday morning, we got a glimpse of this fellow on a tree on the morning safari. A very fruitful trip to BR hills.
It’s that time of the year. Really the only sensible tech event in this part of the world to look forward to.
As Sandesh puts it, We are in the land of the cloud goats. Lots of clouds but no goats. We really did not get the huge groups that we were hoping to get. We did manage to get a small group and the males were getting excited smelling the females urine, but that’s about it. Sometime now they gather in huge groups and then the fights break out between the males etc. We suspect we are early for this event (maybe because of delayed monsoons). Anyway we decided to move on and landed back in Valparai now. We have messengers…
Airtel for some reason is down in Munnar now and I had to fight with a cyber cafe guy for an hour to let me use the computer without an ID proof. He finally gave up the fight when I said he can read all the emails I’m sending out. Anyway will be offline the next 10 days and hopefully should come back with some handsome Nilgiri tahr photographs and footage.
The last few days have been crazy. Though I’ve been in town, had to take care of too many things that were on my plate. Looks like we are heading back this weekend to Munnar/Eravikulam to film the Nilgiri tahr. I really miss still photography. When you are out with a filming team, there is no place for still photography as you are busy either filming or assisting the person who is filming and the last thing you want is a still camera distracting the whole production team. I barely shot less than 4 GB worth of images in the…
SiCKO is probably the best documentary film I’ve ever seen. Michael Moore has managed to do a much better job than Fahrenheit 9/11 (which was mostly Bush bashing). Go download the movie from your favorite torrent site.
Sorry about not updating for such a long time. I got back from Valparai last sunday and been trying to catchup with a months worth of backlog. I’ve almost taken leave and on vacation in Bangalore now. The last trip was quite tough. Since we had gone back to film mostly frogs and rain etc, it meant filming in slushy conditions. We went back in search of the Purple frog again, but even after 10 days of searching we could not find it again. I guess they really go come out and go back into the ground in less than…
It looks like the Monsoon is finally ready to bring in some showers to South India. We are heading back to Valparai now to get more footage of the frog and other creatures which will be welcoming the much needed rain. Seeya all in few days.
I posted the photographs of the Purple frog the day before noelladsa sent the link to boingboing, which they posted yesterday. I got the following mail last night : Subject: Nasikabatrachus_Life in Cold Blood From : Paul Williams Hi Kalyan, I understand that you have recently filmed Nasikabatrachus? This was one of the amphibians that really struck me when I started working on David Attenboroughs “Life in Cold Blood” a natural history of amphibians and reptiles. I met one of the discoverers, Franky Bossuyt, when he visited the natural history museum in London but for various logistical reasons we were…
This frog is a living fossil. It seems it might have split up from other frogs about 150 million years ago and has not changed much since than. There are no close relatives in terms of species for this frog and the nearest one is in the Seychelles islands. It feels like a big bag of jelly when you hold it in your hand and I must say, its a very strong frog. We managed to find few pairs of the Purple frogs and we filmed/photographed them from many angles. I think we might be the first ones to have…