The very first time I managed to take a portrait of a bird was this yellow-wattled lapwing (Vanellus malabaricus). It was on my first trip with a camera to the wild, and it was the first time I learnt to tell a lapwing from other birds. I would later recognize that the sharp looks of this individual meant that it was the breeding season. The clean black cap takes on a more mottled look in non-breeding adults and juveniles. V. malabaricus is a South Asian bird, with a range that covers most of the plains of India, and bits of Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangaldesh. In those early years I used to see these birds fairly often. But when I saw a group again in 2022 I realized that I hadn’t seen them for a while. I cannot verify my impression that they are becoming less common, because I haven’t been going back to the same place over the years. Although they are still classed as being of least concern, their nesting habitat of dry grasslands is being rapidly converted to plantations meant for carbon mitigation. Planting trees is not enough to reach net-zero carbon emission, but cost of even this effort seems to be the loss of ecosystems.
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to post a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine. It would helpful to give as much information as you can: which bird it is, where and when you saw the bird, any behaviour you found interesting, for example. You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” to help other search for old posts. I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.
Among the backyard birds of India oriental magpie-robins (Copsychus saularis) must be the most common. You see them most commonly foraging among fallen leaves or hopping along branches looking for insects. I’ve seen them around Shanghai, which is about as far north as they range. On the west their range ends between Islamabad and Kabul. Their geography is constrained by mountains, deserts, and seas (you can see them in Borneo, but not in the Philippines). In the female the glossy black of the male is replaced by a dull brown. As always, sexual dimorphism indicates a difference in behaviour: although both sexes are involved in raising hatchlings, only the female incubates the eggs. During this time she needs the camouflage.
The photo you see above was among my first close ups of a bird, and I fortunately caught it with its tail characteristically erect. With the short lenses I had then, I would have to creep up close to a bird in order to take a photo like this. I’ve lost that craft now.
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to post a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine. It would helpful to give as much information as you can: which bird it is, where and when you saw the bird, any behaviour you found interesting, for example. You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” to help other search for old posts. I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.
That couldn’t possibly be an Indian spot-billed duck, could it? We were in the middle of Tokyo, after all. No, it was the Eastern spot-billed duck (Anas zonorhynchus) which does not have the orange splash at the top of the bill, near its nostril. Shinobazu pond inside Tokyo’s Ueno Park, where we saw it, is in the middle of the range of this species. To the west their range overlaps their Indian cousins’ along the foothills of the Himalayas, and in the north their range has been expanding well into Asian Russia, possibly as a result of global warming. The result is that it has begun to hybridize with the mallard in Russia. Interestingly, males of the spotbill are more likely to mate with female mallard than the other way around. A closer look at this phenomenon reveals that female ducks are fairly true to their breeding sites, while males range widely. This asymmetric dispersion results in the males having more out-breeding opportunity, if you can call it that, and produces the asymmetric hybridization that is observed. But such hybridization shows that speciation amongst dabbling ducks (the genus Anas) is fairly recent and could be ongoing. Who knows, perhaps the bird watchers of a hotter world could have new dabbling ducks to see!
An invitation
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. There is no compulsion to post a recent photo, but it would help others to know when and where you saw the bird.You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” in case people search for old posts using it.I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.
Akira Kurosawa’s three earliest movies are almost impossible to find. As a result, my closest approach to them came two weeks ago, when I visited the gardens of Denjirō Okōchi, his lead actor on all three. The Ōkōchi Sansō was laid out in the 1930s on the slopes of Mt Ogura in the Arashiyama mountains, but incorporates many of the aesthetic values that developed in the construction of Japanese gardens since Tachibana Toshitsuna wrote the world’s first treatise on the art of gardens, the Sakuteiki, at about the same time that Murasaki Shikibu wrote what is possibly the world’s first novel.
We arrived in Kyoto early in the afternoon. While checking the weather forecast as our shinkansen from Tokyo ate the kilometers, we realized that the afternoon could well be the only day on which we would see a blue sky over Kyoto. It was our best opportunity to walk through Arashiyama. So when we arrived at 4 PM, we were among the last people that day to buy tickets to enter the garden. The ticket entitles you to a cup of matcha and a sweet at the end of your walk. The tea house would be shut by the time we finished our walk, so we were firmly escorted to the tea before our walk. I wish we had reached a half hour earlier, so that we could have enjoyed the tea in the correct relaxed frame of mind, after our walk through the garden.
With our habits of always seeking our own path, changing plans spontaneously, and seeking out the novel, we have to work at reminding ourselves that formal Japanese gardens do not work like that. They are planned to lead you to specific views, where you can stop and be as informal and spontaneous as you want: dash off a piece of poetry for Whatsapp, do a Bollywood dance for Tiktok, or post photos of the view on Instagram. We stepped through the middle gate, the Chūmon. In Japanese culture passing through a gate takes you from one realm to another. So, I collected my thoughts and prepared my mind to follow the prepared path.
In the short break we took for tea, clouds had swept in from the south, and they would not lift until the day we had to leave Kyoto. Our first stop was Daijōkaku, the main house, which is said to merge the exceedingly formal shoin style of architecture with the contrasting sukiya style. I am too much of an architectural novice to tell the difference purely from the exterior, but my guess would be that the front room is in the shoin style. The Chūmon, the Daijōkaku, the Jibutsudō (the temple in the featured photo), and the Tekisuian (the teahouse) are treasured national cultural properties.
After Daijōkaku, high hedges constrained our views, and we should have walked quickly on to the next viewpoint. We were stopped in our tracks by the calls of several birds. I recorded them, and later could only identify the Japanese bush warbler (Horornis diphone), known as uguisu locally, and also called the Japanese nightingale. We walked on to the first viewpoint over Kyoto from the garden (click on the first photo in the gallery below). We studied the plaque which showed the main peaks visible from here, and localed Mt. Jizo. We wouldn’t have time to visit it, I told The Family, as she walked on to the Jibutsudō. My photo of the Meiji era temple which was transported here, leaves out two important aspects of the main view: one is the expanse of gravel in front of it, and the second is the little stream that winds past on one side.
After admiring this view the path doubled back to lead us to the moss garden. Somewhere there the nightingale was still singing. As we climbed past the tea house, Tekisuian, we stopped to see the view of the Hozu river gorge and the distant temple of Sankaku Senkoji. There was a road down to a view point. But before we could turn into it a lady appeared behind us to tell us that the garden would close in five minutes and we needed to make our way to the gate. On our way out we briefly stopped to see the view of the city from the moonlight pavilion (second photo in the clickable gallery above).
The garden has been laid out to show off each of the seasons. We passed through it late in spring: after the flowering of the cherries and azaleas. A few azalea flowers were still wilting on the bushes. I hope we will be back one autumn to see the garden again. If we do, we will take care to come earlier in the day, so that we can spend more time here. Gardens are works of art which need to be seen again and again, in different seasons. Japan has perfected gardens which remain unchanged for centuries although the individual plants are replaced. One cannot fail to remember also the unbroken lines of gardeners who make sure that the garden stays true to the vision of the artists who first laid it out.
A lifer! The brown bird chirped intermittently as it flitted through the base of reeds. Our boatman poled the skiff as quickly as he could to keep up. It was a clamorous reed warbler, recognizable by the white supercilium and round-head, a bird with the wonderful binomial Acrocephalus stentoreus. Looking at the distribution of this bird, also known as the Great Indian reed warbler, I’m puzzled. It is reported from a lot of disconnected patches across the world: as far west as the banks of the Nile, in the north Kazhak plains, southwards around the Java Sea, and eastwards in the Philippines. The thickest sightings are in India and the Philippines. Why is it so patchily distributed? Does that mean that the wetlands where it lives are drying up?
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. There is no compulsion to post a recent photo, but it would help others to know when and where you saw the bird.You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” in case people search for old posts using it.I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.
Snipers are assassins who sit still in one place and pick off their targets when they make an appearance. The word comes from the habits a bird hunter had to adopt in order to “bag” one of these game birds which were once considered a delicacy. The skulking habits of the common snipe (Gallinago gallinago) make them hard to see when you are on land. That’s one of the advantages of birding in Mangalajodi. These birds are not equally wary when you approach them from water. These two stayed in place, feeding, even as our skiff drifted close. The spectacular markings on their back are camouflage when they are in the reeds, but here, at the water’s edge, they are as visible as a tiger’s stripes.
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. There is no compulsion to post a recent photo, but it would help others to know when and where you saw the bird.You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” in case people search for old posts using it.I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.
Please bear with my delays in responding to your comments this week. I’m still travelling outside my usual time zone, and things remain somewhat topsy turvy.
Another victim of whimsical naming, identifying the whiskered tern (Chlidonias hybrida) seemed impossible to me. I couldn’t see the whiskers at all. It turns out that in summer breeding plumage when its head turns black and its body becomes a dark ashy gray, a remaining white band across its face reminded some of human male facial fuzz. India is home to breeding populations of these terns, and also receives climate refugees from the north in winter. In principle I should have noticed the whiskers on the resident birds. But I do most of my birding in winter. So I’d missed the colour change that had just set in between my two visits to Mangalajodi. The featured photo is from early February, the one below from mid-March. You can see the darkening of the feathers. This will continue for another month, I think. It’s too hot to get go back and check.
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. There is no compulsion to post a recent photo, but it would help others to know when and where you saw the bird.You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” in case people search for old posts using it.I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.
Misidentification of pratincoles is common. The Oriental pratincole (Glareola maldivarum) and the collared pratincole (G. pratincola) are both visible in India. They are notoriously difficult to tell apart, and I’ve read a long article about the differences in their appearance. I think the photo that you see below is very likely to be the Oriental pratincole. I’d taken this in mid-March 2022 in Bhigwan, close to Pune in Maharashtra. This place has both kinds of pratincoles, the collared being winter visitors from Central Asia. The lack of white on its secondaries (wing feathers) was one criterion, but I also looked at the black around the eyes, and the extent of orange-buff colour down its front. I took the featured photo early in February 2023 in Mangalajodi in Odisha. I was very surprised by the bird, and just managed to take this one shot. I couldn’t see its tail or back. Based on the colour of its neck and chest I guess that it is an Oriental pratincole. They are also known to breed in Odisha, but it was rather early in the year for a breeder. It should have still been wintering in Australia.
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. There is no compulsion to post a recent photo, but it would help others to know when and where you saw the bird.You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” in case people search for old posts using it.I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.
Bright sunlight brought a juvenile Himalayan rubythroat (Calliope pectoralis) out of hiding and atop a Lantana bush where it let loose a long set of chirps. Its feathers glowed in the morning sun, adding to the autumn brightness around us in the village of Dotiyal in Uttarakhand. Then it looked around at the cameras and preened. It was still too young to fear us. I wonder whether birds have personalities: some timid, some more prone to put themselves in danger. And if so, which survive long enough to breed.
Not very far away I’d seen a Himalayan bulbul (Pycnonotus leucogenys). They are common across the lower heights, and fill up the slopes briefly with their loud chatter. This one drew my attention to the glow of yellowed leaves, above it, the last of the autumn glory from this particular tree. Behind it were whole copses full of evergreens. It’s a lovely time in the hills.
A week before that I’d stopped at a bright orange glow as I walked through the post-monsoon forest on the Mahabaleshwar plateau in the Sahyadris. A closer look showed that the orange was a cluster of mushrooms growing on a tree. Reds and oranges are common colours for fungi, but I’d never seen this particular fungus before. I wish there were more mushroom enthusiasts: perhaps then a couple of field guides may be written. Without them I’m lost at trying to identify them.
Up in the Himalayas, as another day of bird watching came to an end, we stood at the edge of a road and looked across the meadows at the far ridge, where the sky seemed to catch fire. I’m a bit blasé about fiery skies, but The Family wanted me to catch this moment. This bit of autumn glow is for her.
The last glow of an autumn day came late, long after sunset. Entering dark woods without a light, listening for the call of Mountain Scops Owls (Otus spilocephalus). We were lucky that we didn’t have to crash through the dark woods for long. One called right next to where we parked. Its eyes glowed in the dark. This was a wonderfully lucky shot.
Was it an Intermediate egret (Ardea intermedia) that had just given me that aggressive look? Egrets are always confusing. An expert might look at the size of its bill and identify it. I had to look at its feet to make sure. It had black legs for sure, and when it took a step, I saw that its feet were also black. So A. intermedia it was. Early spring, and it was into its breeding season already. Its bill, normally yellow in winter, had turned black, and it had the long neck feathers that it wears when it is in search of a mate. You can tell why I was confused when you see the photo of a Little egret (Egretta garzetta) which was foraging nearby. In breeding season you can only tell the difference by observing that its feet are yellow.
There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. There is no compulsion to post a recent photo, but it would help others to know when and where you saw the bird.You might consider using the tag “Bird of the Week” in case people search for old posts using it. I hope you’ve had the time to look at what others have added this week and in the previous weeks.
Don't hold your breath 