Wildlife

Colugos from Singapore

Benjamin Lee has a very interesting Job. He works for the Singapore National Parks Board. He is responsible for maintaining the tree cover in town and also the National parks and watersheds. I was introduced to Ben as he was the best person to show me Colugo in the wild in Singapore. He called me last evening and said he has a very special surprise for me. A Colugo had entered one of the buildings next to the park and we had to go pick it up and release it back in the national park. It was dropped off at…

Bharatpur Photographs

The Bharatpur photographs are finally up. This is one of my best catch of the lot. Snake Bird – Threat display Bharatpur, Rajasthan, 4 Mar 2006 This Darter (Snake bird) let me go real close for me to get a good portrait shot. At one point, I was too close and I had stepped into the birds comfort zone. The bird turned towards me and performed this display to scare me away. Of course I did get scared, as this was a big bird and it could jump on me and injure me quite badly. Check out rest of the…

Lizard Photography

To get a nice portrait like this one has to really work hard like this (Picture shot by Harsha) This female lizard had just laid it’s eggs and was very protective about them. This is it’s threat display to scare other animals away. Normally it’s very tough to photograph these lizards, but this female in Bandipur was very brave and refused to run.

Eye Pecker

The pictures of the Vine Snake were my fav from my Kudremukh Trip last week. Over all we saw about 13 new species of snakes (most of them dead, run over on the road). We saw this little fella crossing the road and managed to save it life from a passing truck. The Green Vine Snake is sometimes called as the ‘Eye Pecker’ because people believe it pecks humans eyes. In this picture it was quite agitated and was trying bite us off. Another amazing thing about this snake is that it can extend half of its body into midair…

Elephants, Monkeys and Tigers

Last week, sriramb was out of town and a lot of work was stalled for various reasons. So I decided to make a quick dash into the forest and boy, oh boy what a trip that was. At Bandipur, I got to see tons of elephants. In 2 days, I think I saw more then 50 elephants and they posed for me real nice. On one of the days, me and bunch of other folks trekked from Gopalswamybetta to the entrance of the national park. It was almost a full day trek and I’ve had one of the scariest encounter’s…

Tiger Tiger

Just had the best Tiger sighting of my life. I was driving to the Tribal NGO place in the jeep when this large male tiger crossed the road right in front of me. I stopped the jeep and switched off the engine. This tiger walked into some nice green grass, glared at me for more then a min and all along flicking it’s tail. Then slowly he melted into the forest. I’m kicking myself for not having my camera with me at that time. Anyway was a lovely sighting and something that I will remember for a long time to…

The owl that made the trip

This owl is the Oriental Bay Owl. People thought this bird was extinct in India till 1992 and till date only 2 – 3 birds have been spotted in India. When we actually saw the bird and started shooting, the bird was in a weird angle and we were not getting any good shots. Then the skies opened up and we had to rush to a watch tower. After the rain, Yathin and Vijay wanted to get back, but I stayed back in the forest with the guide to shoot this bird. After spending half an hour, he finally looked…

Hectic lyfe

Things have been crazy since I’ve come back from the trip. No net access, broken car, lot of running around the town this week. Hopefully I will sit around and upload all my pics this weekend. The trip itself was excellent. I got to photograph Oriental Bay Owl, which apparently has not been photographed by anyone till date (Subspecies from south India). Got to photograph another lovely and rare bird named Frogmouth. Trekked a lot and I’m still getting over all the leech & tick bites. The rains have been a letdown though. Where has the monsoon gone ? Anyway…

Showing tribals the Internet.

The folks here who work in the camp are truly amazing set of people. They have all come from the near by tribal villages and can speak only kannada. Today while I was working on my machine, they came over and asked me if I could show them a plane. Apparently they have never seen a plane in their lives, only few times flying really high above the forests. Infact they were going gaga over the pics of Bangalore. They have never been out of 50KM radius from here, never visited bangalore, never seen the sea and never even got…