It is amazing how even those silly things around never fail to fascinate us. We are already watching something or the other. A hawker who sits outside a restaurant I go has something interesting everyday which fascinates everybody who is around sipping coffee. He has these small plastic toys which are not very different from what we see around. His dolls can dance and the birds can sing. The dools dance together. The music is crappy but it feels like an orchestra ( a bad one). But that doesn’t stop fascinating them. He puts up a show for all of us who visit the restaurant. I don’t think he manages to sell any of his toys, but still it is fun

We were walking along the foothills of Turahalli which was went we saw a large raptor soaring up there. It had this whitish plumage with dark feathers which easily helped us in saying that it wasn’t a kite. It is mostly the crows or the kites chasing out the owls in Turahalli. It was soaring above for quite a long time during which it also got chased and nearly attacked by a kite. Once the pale morph specimen disappeared to the other side of the hill, we saw another Darph morph Booted Eagle soaring again.
Location: Turahalli Reserve Forest,Bangalore

Booted Eagle(Pale morph)

Booted Eagle (Dark morph)

Black Kite chasing Booted eagle

During a short visit to Turahalli last weekend, we saw this lark hopping around in the scrubs. After a while, it came out and sat on a pole for quite a long time.

+2

Today I attended a talk by Dr Martin Gilbert, a vet with WCS on “Health and Conservation in Asia: From Avian Influenza, Barheaded Geese to the Vulture decline” at the Raman Research Institute. While most of us have heard about the banding of Bar-headed Goose, it was great listening to the man behind the programme. It is interesting on how this is all related to the Avian Influenza. It is also interesting to note that it was Martin’s study on how the drug Diclofenac residues caused the vulture population declination which made the world awake about the issue. Martin began his talk with an introduction to the epidemic influenza virus and how the H and N combination can result in various subsets. So most of the influenza virus spreads through the domestic birds and this being a epidemic can spread to the wild birds too. Since domestic birds in poultry are in large numbers together it spreads very fast. Since India is very populous, it was also interesting for them to study and see if it spreads to humans too. The waterbirds and shore birds are supposed to be more prone to this virus than the others

Female Bar-headed Geese ‘79′ on 3/12/09 at the Eastern Range,Kaziranga National Park

According to Martin, there weren’t any cases of wild birds dying due to Influenza before 2005. But in 2005 there was a outbreak in wild birds in Qinghai, China where nearly 5000 birds died out of which 50% were the Bar-headed Geese and the rest included the Ruddy Shelducks, Gulls etc. So they decided to study the migration pattern of the birds since there is high possibility that these long distance migratory birds could be carrying the influenza virus in them. So they started using the Neck Collaring technique where they marked the bird to track their migration. Neck Collaring, he said could be used for most birds like Swan and Geese which had a longer neck but couldn’t be used to ducks because that could be obstacle for their preening. They choose Mongolia as a place to start with because it was a place where they could see a lot of these birds and there was not much poultries around that these wild birds could come in contact with. So they went out in the dark, took one of the birds in a large group and collared them. Even the marking numbers were designed in such a way there would be no scope for ambiguity when the bird was finally tracked somewhere. A lot of interesting results of the collared Bar-headed Headed Geese have come by since then. There have been numerous sightings of the bird while it was wintering in India esp Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and from North-East too. There have been 40 re-sightings with 20 individual sightings until now. There is a certain bird which was tagged in Mongolia and has been tracked in Karnataka for 2 years now and again back in Mongolia with the same family after the Indian winter.

We (Ashwini Bhat, Adithya UN, Konwar and yours truly) had a sighting of a Female Bar-headed Geese ‘79′ on 3/12/09 at the (26.6826, 93.5466)Eastern Range of Kaziranga National Park. It was tagged at Sharga Nuur, Bulgan aimag on 14 July 2009. Sharga Nuur is a few miles north of Khunt Nuur, Mongolia. This was out of the hundreds of Bar-headed Geese that we saw there.

Martin also spoke about the Vulture study and the conservation methods adopted for saving the vulture including the concept of Vulture Restaurants where they work with the local community to feed vultures and also promote eco-tourism around it. He then spoke about the Wildlife trade and how human can be prone to deadly diseases due to wildlife trade. He said that Govt and the policy makers would understand it better if it is put forward as a national health issue rather than a wildlife issue. The audience asked a few interesting questions too. One of them if he was really sure that wild birds could get influenza from the domestic birds to which Martin replied that it was a conclusion based on several reports and studies and not something for which they can come out with a proof. It was interesting talk even though I thought he would go a little deeper into the collar programme. Probably given the time, he had too much to cover in a single talk.

I managed to wake up 10 mins before 6am. I dont even have a mobile phone. I quickly called up my friend that I would reach Banashankari bus stop in 15 minutes and I managed that by getting into a sumo taxi which was heading towards the bus stop. We started by 6.15am to Yellamma Lake, a lake which has been in the news for hosting thousands of Northern Shovelers, the winter migrants to this part of the world. It took us about 90mins to reach that place which even included a pit stop for refueling ourselves with some Idly and coffee at one of the darshinis near KR Puram.

Location: Yellamma Lake, NH4, KR Puram, Bangalore

The lake looked very huge on Google Maps. After getting detailed directions from Chandrashekar Bandi who had first reported about the Northern Shovelers on BNGbirds, we reached the lake. The lake is just by the National Highway 4 but the birds didn’t seem to be near the road. So as per his directions, we went through the other side of the lake by passing through a small village. This time it was a lake on one side and uncultivated village fields on the other side which had reeds. We walked along the bund to the end point and there we saw the thousands of shovelers. It gives you such a high to so see so many of them there. There is human habitation all around the lake. Villagers were happily washing clothes and neither the shovelers nor the villagers seemed to have been bothered by each other.

Northern Shoveler – male in the front

We were watching them for a while trying to get a good view of them and also trying to see if there are any other species of birds there. It always seemed to us that we were seeing a lot of kites. Suddenly a Black Kite like creature came flying towards them and all shovelers took off at once. It was an amazing sighting to see all of them taking off at once. The pictures made me realise that it was the female Marsh and not the Black Kite. There were a few Spot-billed Ducks too flying across.

(more…)

I have finished my quota of Eurasian Marsh Harriers Circus aeruginosus for this season. Every bird which looked like a raptor seemed to be the Eurasian Marsh Harrier at Yellamma Lake.

This one is a Female Marsh Harrier. Typically you’d see their wings in ‘V’ shape in flight. The white markings on their shoulders makes it easy to identify them. The open fields near the Yellamma lake had a lot of harrier activity. They are migrants to India.

It is supposed to be the brightest full moon day and I spent some time watching the moon. There was a report in the TOI newspaper which said,

Scientists said the Moon will be at its brightest and biggest because its orbit is an ellipse with one side being 50,000 km closer to the Earth than the other. Saturday’s full moon will be around 15% bigger and 30% brighter as compared to other full moons.

It was already getting dark and we were heading back from Mydenahalli. The cloud overcast made it look really beautiful. Suddenly out of nowhere a bird with a light greyish body and black tail came and sat on a rock. It took me a while to realise that I was seeing a Montagu’s Harrier Circus pygargus. It was sitting on a small rock in this open scrub habitat. While we were closely observing them, another Adult male came flying in too. Its sharp eyes gives it a killer look. We tried clicking our cameras but with very low light there was hardly anything that we could do. These two males took off after a few minutes to another small rock but a little far away. We did try looking at it through our binocs and kept patting our luck for being able to sight these migratory raptors. There were only 2 of us in the group of 5 who were birders but the rest of them did look amazed at the variety of birds they could see around. We had decided to look for these two Adult Harriers and tried walking slowly towards that rock so that we don’t disturb them. While we were walking, we saw another one just taking off not very far from us. That was when we realised that there were a whole bunch of them there. As it got darker, the rest of them kept hovering in the sky probably looking out for good stuff for dinner. It had started drizzling and we could see atleast 10 of them hovering in the sky.

That one hour of birding made our day. It was something more than what we could wish for. Soon after this trip, I was off to Kaziranga and I haven’t been able to find time to post these pics. Today I realised that I had lost all of those harrier pics while formatting my system recently. Anyway, I can still remember every moment of that evening :-)

The Plain Prinias are resident breeders in India. What catches my attention here are its eyes. They are so beautiful.