Let me begin by wishing you a very happy new year. May your dreams take wings in 2011!

I suffered from severe writer’s block for last two months of 2010 and left this space hardly updated. Some photography assignments and a few other things I was working on kept me occupied, which means I also did very little reading online, rarely visited blogs or kept myself updated with happenings in the online-world. However, I managed to keep paintedstork facebook page updated regularly.

I normally do not take the trouble to make new year resolutions—they get broken anyway—and it is no different for 2011. But at this moment, I am hoping to keep this space active at least for the next few months. Let me begin with stories from a visit to Bharatpur’s Keoladeo National Park in November 2010, recounting my encounters with the beautiful birds in the park.

In the three days that I spent in Bharatpur, I hardly saw any rare or exotic birds except for a pair of Sarus Cranes. But I could observe many common species from a close distance and cherished watching their behavior. The most common birds in the park were perhaps rose ringed parakeets that chattered loudly in the trees all through the day in every corner of the park. The rarest among the birds I saw were a pair of black necked storks and a pair of sarus cranes.

The first birds I saw in the park were Brahminy Mynas in a small gathering, followed by jungle babblers in their typical group of five to six. Soon after getting past the entrance, I was excited to see a peafowl family with five chicks foraging in the shrubs. There was further excitement ahead as I spotted two jackals shying away into the jungle and watched a parakeet trying to threaten an enemy hiding in a tree hallow.

The first of the birds that posed happily for my camera were laughing doves. There were plenty of them in Bharatpur. Early morning and evenings, a careful listener could hear the sound of their laughter filling the air. They were also happy to pose for the camera and did not run away at the first sight of a telephoto lens. I first saw a lone laughing dove sitting on the top of a bush. It sat there gracefully until I took a few pictures, but decided to fly away on seeing an approaching vehicle.

Laughing Dove

Half-an-hour later, I saw a pair of doves walking slowly at the edge of the tarmac road that bisects the park. They seemed wary of me, but did not feel threatened as long as I kept my distance. They hopped slowly along the shoulder of the road, occasionally picking whatever they found worth gulping. I lay down on the ground to get an eye-level picture, but they did not seem to like me doing that and decided to walk away from me. A little later, one of them sat on the lowest branch of a bush, started preening and at the same time generously posing for me. I was more than happy to go on clicking it displaying the colourful feathers.

A laughing dove showing off its feathers!

Coming up next: more birds from Bharatpur.

Tweet

Share

Subscribe to India Travel Blog |  Email This Post | 3 Comments

Related Posts

• Bharatpur – Birds in the Marshes
• Nilgai at Bharatpur
• Keoladeo National Park, Bharatpur – Rose Ringed Parakeets
• Common Kingfisher
• Common Kestrel