deponti

Though the bird sightings on our Saturday trip were very sparse, I was thrilled to have a good sighting of the

SIRKEER MALKOHA




I have seen this bird once before, at Turahalli, for a very brief few seconds; this time, it was right out in the open, and right next to the road! We all got out for a few shots, and I also took this video of the bird preening:








Immediately afterwards, we saw two BLUE-FACED MALKOHAS, but they vanished in the tangled shrubbery before we could even get a proper look! That's the way birding goes....

I had a wonderful trip to Turahalli, Galibore and Ramnagara with amoghavarsha, anushsh and sharathm....here they are, shadows in the sunset:




Anush, I must say, was a very reluctant co-tripper...


I find that I seem to have forgotten all the names of the common butterflies that I used to know very well. WHAT is someone with a bad memory supposed to do? It's awful...and a little worrying.

Well, while I hunt for the id's, here's a scene that appealed to me at Galibore on the campus of

JLR






In Tamizh, those earth-moving implements are called "maN vetti" (literally, "cut the earth"). They are in between a hoe and a shovel...wonder what they are called in English? "shoe"? "hovel"? :) (LJ user="asakiyume">, those Orrible Puns were for you!)

To me...that photograph is about wood....the living wood of the tree, bearing leaves, and the dead wood of the hoes and the window shutters...

But on a lighter note, what would YOU say about that hen in the window?


Though not productive in terms of number of bird-sightings, the trip was most enjoyable...even though I slept most of the time that I was in the car, as the jet lag and the strong painkillers I'd taken for the jaw pain joined hands to knock me out!


The sunset was painted in intense colours:




And a little later:

On Saturday, a sudden change of plan resulted in my forgetting to take MLC2 when I went to attend the wedding; and there, I found the bride's uncle, after the ceremony, taking pictures of a huge spider with a large egg-sac. I watched it, of course, but felt bad that I couldn't take photographs.

On Sunday, however, Madhu, Kusi and I decided that rather than go to Delaware to do some hiking, we would go to the same

Wissahickon area .

And....when we reached

Valley Green Inn ,

I went over to the tree where I had seen the spider, laughing at my own idiocy in looking for the spider again...and..there she was!



Amazingly, she didn't react at all to my presence, and sat, perfectly still; I don't know if this is normal behaviour for a spider with an egg sac...butI was thankful that she allowed me the time to observe her for a while.


You can see the very large egg sac in this picture that I took ffrom the side:





Could someone tell me what spider this is? She was a little larger than a golf ball...

Update: charleshaynes has id'd it, correctly, I think, as a

WOLF SPIDER


Thank you, Charles and Debbie! :)

We went, after Karthik's alert, to see the glow-worms again this year:

http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/blogs/show_entry/942-the-glow-worms


Here's my post about it last year ...



Where do they come from? Where do they go?
Why are they so tiny? Why do they glow?
Why do just some of them have wings?
What, exactly, is "bioluminicence"?
Is it a word that even makes sense?
Have you wondered about all these things?


If so..

click

here

I went, as usual, to meet all the people who took the NTP....this time, there has been a full contingent (the accomodation at the Bannerghatta property of JLR is 8 X 2, and 17 people had registered, which meant that three of the young women have had to share one tent!

I realized that I knew several members beforehand, but it was nice to meet others for the first time, too!

The group was a very nice one, including a mother-daughter duo, and another young couple who had brought their delightful five-year-old, Arohi, along with them. Arohi and I had a great time swinging on the suspended tyre in the campus, and trailing around the place while the others were getting edified!



Here's the very intelligent, articulate little girl (sorry, young female person):




( more about the NTP Nature Trail )


Well, here's most of the NTP group as they came up the forest trail, with Karthik in their midst; they are so earnest about learning as much as they can, that weekend!




I do hope they enjoyed the program as much as I enjoyed meeting all of them (though I really had to chase up some of them to get their email ids and details!) and I hope they will be active members of the egroup, too!

Update: the minute I left, the group apparently sighted the Eurasian Eagle Owls, the only debate being whether there were two or three of them...*&^% Owls!! this is the first time I have gone on the Nature Trail with the NTP and not seen them!

I suddenly decided to take Madhusmita, a friend whom I met on the JLRNTP egroup, and who has become quite close, to the Bannerghatta Zoo area this morning.....

Here's a very expensive fruit from a very valuable tree....





Those are cashew nuts.....

Here's more info about them, at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cashew

Aren't they beautiful, as well as being tasty? There are quite a few trees, here and there, near the tourist area....

Though the birds kept us occupied, our mission (Ramesh, Geetanjai, Anush and I...all NTP members) was to try and identify a village to develop homestays in, and to try and develop bird trails and train some of the village youth to act as bird guides, giving them both revenue and a reason to protect the birds and the environment. We have been somewhat successful...

But so many beautiful scenes took my eye....

The stream that runs through the area we visited makes patterns of light and shadow as it runs tinkling over the rocks:



( more sights )

Here's one man, whom we found building a mud structure in the village. He was skilled at his work, and very dignified indeed:



We are hoping to make headway with our work in the area, but meanwhile, the trips are very enjoyable, too!

Off to the Bannerghatta Zoo area tomorrow with Madhusmita (NTP)....what will the day be like?..I wonder (the first line of a very famous song from the Sound of Music!)

Off to sleep now...g'night folks, haven't caught up with my friends' lists, either...!

Last Saturday was a great day; Veena wanted several of her friends to come along for a birding trip, so we all went to Bannerghatta ...itsalouwelylife was also here for the weekend, and the LJ part of the crowd was anushsh, mohanvee, IALL, and me....

The NTP group consisted of Anush, Mohanvee, Jyothi (who is taking the NTP next weekend) and me....

What better way to start a morning than the song of a lark? Here's the INDIAN BUSHLARK, which was singing sweetly on the wire outside the JLR Restaurant:



( You can click here several pictures of plants, a reptile, a butterfly, and birds.... )

I finally took a couple of shots of the flash-of-electric-blue-as-it-flies WHITE-BREASTED KINGFISHER, sitting and calling atop a bamboo shoot:





And lastly, here is the group who went that day (except anushsh</a>

Oh, the image is too large so the entire right-hand-side contingent, including the two Mohans, have been cut off...to see the photo, click
here

I am off to Bannerghatta (this time, the Elephant Corridor beyond the large quarry)...so my Ragihalli (last Sunday) post will have to wait a little...sorry...too many domestic chores have resulted in a gol (that's backlog!)....

It was a "heritage" experience....


http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/blogs/show_entry/906


Actually, since my MLC is not yet repaired, this photo was taken by D C Manohar, and the image is a large one....only half of it fits here.

To see the entire photograph, click here

Another lovely morning at Ragihalli on Sunday followed this lovely Saturday....

I don't need to mention how I value the NTP that I took in March 2006. It's given me access to Karthik's immense knowledge, and brought me a lot of on-the-net and face-to-face friends, all of whom have unstintingly helped me in my learning about birds and wildlife.

So let me announce the next NTP....

Here's the email from JLR:



----------------------------------
Greetings from Jungle Lodges and Resorts Ltd.!
We are pleased to inform you that the dates for the next Naturalists Training Programme has been finalised. The details of the programme are as follows.


( all the details if you are interested... )

I have personally found the NTP of immense value... in terms of information and friends and the whole learning process!

An article I wrote some time ago:


http://www.deccanherald.com/archives/nov192006/finearts1942320061118.asp

If any of you can, do book at Bandipur JLR, and ask for the cottages with the murals in them!

When I went to the Malleswaram Heritage Walk, my beloved MLC fell to the ground, and though it was in a bag, it still broke...and the camera guy told me that it would cost "more than 3K" (that more-than sounds ominous!)....

Yesterday we went to attend the wedding of fellow NTP-er, sainath (can you imagine, I can't post a pic of him and his very beautiful bride, as there is no MLC!)...and, a very rare occurrence for me, I had decided to take the car.

So naturally, an autorickshaw (I don't know WHERE the driver was looking, he could not have hit me if he had been looking ahead) hit the car broadside on, on the left-hand-side, and when we stopped to look at the damage, he ran away. We spent a lot of time trying to see how we could file an FIR at the nearest police station....

It turned out that if the damages were anything less than 7K,it doesn't make sense to claim insurance, as we would lose the no-claim bonus for the next two years, and that would amount to a loss of 5K....so today, the tinker-job garage told me that it would be done for 6.5K...and we are not claiming insurance, which is anyway a big pain...

That flapping noise that you hear is all those K's flying out of our pockets quite quickly....! That's why I feel that worrying about money is futile...K sera sera....whatever (expenses) will be, will be!

We still managed a lovely weekend, though!

My friend Geetanjali Dhar started a very worthwhile initiative for the children in the gated community where she, her husband Subir, and daughter Avantika, live. They go regularly for adventure activities in the weekends, and part of this is a birding trip, conducted by volunteers.

Vittal , his 10-year-old son Aditya (who is a better birder than his dad, and sometimes I think, a better writer too!) Anush , and I are regulars, but this time we co-opted Chandu and Mahesh . Except for Mahesh (who missed taking the NTP because of illness), all of us are NTP members.

Geetanjali and Subir took all of us...several children and some adults from their community...to an area beyond the huge quarry in the Bannerghatta area. This part, except for the communicating road, seemed to be not disturbed, and we walked around for about an hour; I can confidently say that no matter how the conductees felt about the trip, the conductors had a great time!


What was sad was the way all our wildernesses are being converted to housing layouts...I like this image because it shows what's happening...




The mango tree is in full bloom, but right in front of it is the construction worker carrying material to put up more habitation...and soon, the trees, the grass, the flora and fauna will all go....

Oh well, who am I to complain, probably the apartment block that I live in also despoiled the forest area in a similar way, twenty years ago!

( some birds and other creatures from our Bannerghatta walk )


But to me, the most interesting part of the trip was this BLACK-SHOULDERED KITE, which, for the first time, I saw perched on a tree instead of its usual telephone-wire roost! The bird was "wagging" its tail in a metronome-like fashion for quite a long time....








Here's the video that I took of this behaviour...






I have never seen this behaviour before, and I don't think the bird was balancing itself, as there was no breeze at all, and the movement of the tail was too regular for that, too. First time I have seen a Black-Shouldered Kite pretending to be a WAGTAIL! :)

Well...whether I get an explanation or not...the Bannerghatta forest area is just wonderful, and we had a great morning!

I wrote several articles and "middles" regularly for the Deccan Herald before I started writing for Citizen Matters, and after having met Sangeetha Kadur and hijacked her and Madhukar (another expert birder whose work with the digiscope can be found here ) home,I
went and googled for the article about the artists who painted the beautiful murals at Bandipur...it's at


http://www.deccanherald.com/archives/nov192006/finearts1942320061118.asp


Oh, I have referred to it in

this post

Alas, that last mural remains unfinished, and JLR never continued with this great initiative....but Sangeetha continues with her wildlife painting, and is at present working on a book on humming birds! More power to her brush...


Hmm...I thought I had lost all the articles that I wrote, I realize I can hunt for them...these simple things take the Concrete Cauliflower a while to understand!

The Wildscreen Festival proved far more interesting than I budgeted for; the masterclass by Jeremy Bristow was riveting, and the one by Laura Marshall on managing productions, applies to so many situations that demand good scheduling to ensure a successful outcome. More in my writeup for Citizen Matters! :)

Moderating the JLRNTP egroup has benefited me in many ways; I have met a lot of interesting people. One of these is Santosh Martin, who live in Bellary. I had heard of Santosh's work in researching and documenting the Great Indian Bustard in Bellary District, but when I visited him, I found that he was much more versatile than that!




( More about Santosh Martin )


He took an immense amount of trouble to show me around Daroji (I spotted several new birds whose names I hope I will remember) and also took me to see the ruins of the Vijayanagar empire at Hampi , and truly made it a memorable visit!

A great friend to have found through email and egroup....I do hope he is successful in all his endeavours!

PAW=Photographer at Work!

An image of someone busy documenting something he found fascinating....




I do like the way the sun just lights up the grass at Valley School... the peace of the morning spent there has stayed with me throughout the day.

It was a great weekend for varied sightings at Bannerghatta; let me show you the few that I was able to get on my camera...I never, for example, got a pic of the Asian Paradise Flycatcher, though we saw both the male and the female quite a few times.

Some of the flowers looked really lovely....




Thanks to Chandu for showing me this shot.

( more photographs from Bannerghatta )

In conclusion, here is the amazing "death's head" of the dead spider, that the wasp later used as a food store for her eggs in her burrow:




Looking forward to my next trip to Bannerghatta....

Can you imagine, me actually WORKING so hard that I could neither post, nor catch up with my friends' list? It actually happened today; two articles were past what I had determined to be the deadline for them...and phone instruments had to be repaired, and broadband installed in the new office...


The weekend was a great experience, with the new batch of the Naturalists' Training Program that Karthik conducts.

One of the unusual features of this batch was that most of the members were not people coming together for the first time during the course, but were a well-knit group, called Junglescapes. For a nominal yearly fee, members of this organization go on wildlife trips, and are also involved in activities in the Bandipur area.

I got to know about them through my friend Shalini, and it was an added bonus that a young friend of mine (through Avinash) called Rachana Patwardhan, and KM, too, decided to take the course.

I went on Saturday to find the group discussing the differences between various kinds of fauna ( doves/pigeons, frogs/toads, tortoises/turtles, and so on), and we took the Nature trail in the evening; we saw several birds ( I photographed much fewer of them!) during the weekend.

The first sight that met our eyes was this LITTLE CORMORANT sunning itself in typical fashion:



( Birds of Bannerghatta.... )

Since we managed to sight quite a few mammals, too, I will do a separate post on them, but let me close with this beautiful mushroom that Chandu pointed out to me:

KM also decided to take the JLRNTP this time; and we had a wonderful time (I usually go and meet the members and take their details for the egroup.) Here are two of my favourite images from the weekend:


Fleet-Footed Innocence






That's the epitome of innocence and shyness....fawns are so beautiful!

and...

Liana Sunrise:




The forest is captivating....

I have a long-standing condition called spondylosis, which sometimes escalates into spondylitis (-itis=inflammation). Since early this morning, my head has been spinning and I have hardly been able to keep my balance. I have just been --literally-- lying low, just about getting my household chores done, and not even opening my laptop, you can imagine how bad it must be!

So I was completely touched when a friend called up and asked, "I came to the computer just now, no blog entry from you...how are you? Are you OK and in town?"

Being missed is one of the nicest things that can happen to one...it shows that one is liked, if not loved.

So let me update...on Saturday and Sunday, KM took the JLRNTP course that Karthik conducts ( I will help him with the material from Friday), and we had some really phenomenal sightings.....BLACKBUCK, GAUR, WILD BOAR, the ASIAN PARADISE FLYCATCHER, the EURASIAN EAGLE OWL, the GREY-BELLIED CUCKOO, the BLUE-FACED MALKOHA, the ASHY DRONGO, and so on.....

Karthik is such an amazing repository of knowledge....

This group of NTP consisted of 11 people who belong to a wildlife group called Junglescapes, about whom more anon.


But meanwhile, just in case any more of you missed me, too....

The birds never lose an opportunity to be extremely disrespectful to me, and when this RED-VENTED BULBUL saw me, he decided to show me that he was, indeed, a red-vented bulbul...





You could say he really "vented" on me!

Tomorrow, more pics from Bannerghatta, and also, some excellent marketing techniques for a VERY eco-friendly product that is familiar to you all....