With this new job, I rarely get to decide my schedule. Its the animals and weather that decide it for me. I just got a call this evening about a chance to film one of the most deadly creatures in the world. Just packing my bags and am off first thing in the morning to the western ghats. If I can get it on tape, this will be the first time anyone would have filmed this creature’s behavior in the wild. Yes, I’m a bit scared, but I’ll have an expert at hand. More about it when I get back…

The last 10 days were really hectic as we finally started our shoot for the BBC documentary. We spent a day in Mysore and the rest in Bandipur, waiting at the waterholes for the animals to turn up mostly. Wildlife film making is atleast 20 times tougher than photography. The sound needs to be there, everything on heavy tripods, cannot hand carry the cameras and lenses and one always needs a crew. Working from 4:30am till midnight did not make it any easier. Alphonse Roy (Probabilty India’s best wildlife film maker) and Harry Marshall (Our producer and director from Icon…

Joy The short trip back to the grasslands was very productive and I was able to trek around a lot easier this time around. I’ve had an amazing sighting of a Jungle cat and wild dogs with pups. I’ll try to process those pics as soon as I find time. Meanwhile, I’ve uploaded the last trips photos onto my gallery. The person in the above photograph is Kapilan who is one of the main forest guards over there. He’s standing at the edge of Kerala and Tamil Nadu starts down the vallery from where he is standing. Infact most of…

Had a lovely relaxing weekend for a change. I was in the city and didn’t have meetings/work to attend. Managed to see the movie – namesake. Very well done movie. Leaving for Eravikulam again tomorrow on a quick trip to close the camp there for now. We will resume searching for new species once the monsoon starts. Picked up MotoRazr V3i again and I’ve already dropped it twice. I promise to update my photo gallery as soon as I get back from this trip.

I eventually did not find my cellphone and I spent some time last night researching on the latest phones. I was considering the Treo or Nokia R61, but looks like I’ll just go in for my old phone – MotoRazr V3i So last night I had this funny dream. I was at this photo expo and I was at the Nikon stall. They were showing off this new Treo handheld which could connect to the Nikon D200 and do all kinda fancy stuff. It could operate the camera via the Wifi adapter and you could control the whole camera remotely….

Lost my cell phone tonight. It feels like shit

A 30 min long exposure at eravikulam, facing south towards Anai mudi.

If any of you want to work as a Naturalist with one of the best wildlife company in India, then drop me a mail. Sarath, who was the one who offered me a job as a naturalist is looking for people for his new company Taj Safaris which is working in partnership with CC Africa. I have seen what they do, and sometimes I myself still get tempted to go there and join as a Naturalist. The pay is very decent, no previous wildlife experience needed ( just some interest as they will do the training) and some of the…

The Shola forests are like sponges. They store all the water during the monsoon and slowly squeeze it out rest of the year. This is the reason why the sholas have such thick density of plant life and are always humid and moist. Eravikulam National park has lot of streams originating from many of these sholas. The photos below is the stream closest to the hut.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the most striking thing about Eravikulam was the Landscape. The core area looks totally different from the tourism zone (Rajmalai), where 99.9% of the tourists land up. Most of the national park is about 2000 meters elevation, so most of the time, the peaks are above the clouds (hence called cloud forests). During winters, the temperature drops below freezing and even when I was there last week, the night temperatures were approaching close to freezing. I missed most of the morning golden light shots as it was just too cold to wake up…