Himantopus himantopus – Don't hold your breath

A stirring sunset

Black-winged stilts (Himantopus himantopus) stalked about the shallows on their long red legs. In good light they are wonderful subjects for photos, because of their reflections in the surface of water. The shallows of Mangalajodi were full of them, and they loomed over the sandpipers and godwits which foraged with them. While trying to take photos of the sunset, I noticed a stilt deliberate roil the water to disturb hidden prey. I turned my camera quickly on it and was lucky enough to get the movement. That’s what you see in the featured photo.

The nice thing about photographing birds in such habitats is that when you can’t do that any more you can turn your camera on other subjects. In the evening, as the light failed birds were not still enough to be photographed, so I went back to taking snapshots of the sunset. Shallows, reeds, grass, they are nice subjects when the light is appropriate.

Gold and feathers

Sunset on Bhigwan’s lake was a quiet time. Fishermen and farmers were on the way home from work. Herdsmen had brought their cattle to water for a last time in the day. Distant sounds of traffic had quietened. We’d heard calls of birds all day. That was completely gone as the light turned to gold. This was a good time for bird photography on the water. An Indian pond heron (Ardeola grayii) stopped looking for fish as soon as I’d clicked the featured photo and stalked to the hollow of the trunk and laid its head on its shoulder, preparing to sleep.

We’d been on open water most of the afternoon. Now, as we drifted close to the shore, I started noticing a completely different set of birds. There was a common redshank (Tringa totanus), its mottled and streaky feathers quite distinctive. I didn’t want the Black-winged stilt (Himantopus himantopus) in the photo, but the boat was drifting slowly and there was no quick way of getting it out of the way, except by changing focus.

There were reeds near the shore. I’d seen Garganeys (Spatula querquedula) all day, dabbling in the open waters. The white streaks on the head are quite distinctive. But none had come close enough for a photo. I took one now through the reeds. Behind it were Grey-headed swamphen (Porphyrio poliocephalus, formerly known as the Indian subspecies of Purple swamphens). I would get photos of them later.

At this time of the day, the colour of the water depends very strongly on which direction you look at. As I turned my gaze westwards I saw a Grey heron (Ardea cinerea) seated atop a mooring post sunk into the water. Behind it you can see one of the small villages dotted along the edge of the lake.

And finally, looking due west, on a sea of gold, a Brown-headed gull (Chroicocephalus brunnicephalus) had stopped its incessant daily flights, patrolling the water to keep it free of fish. Now it rested gently in the shallows. Later it would paddle closer to the shore and go to sleep on a sandbank. It was time for us to turn back too.

Science da kamaal! Posts appear automatically while I travel off net.

Landscape with dinosaurs and a shoe

On our last morning in Bera, we woke before sunrise again, and scoured the hills for the sight of a leopard. Alarm calls of peacocks echoed between the rocks as we waited patiently for the animals to appear. But one by one, the clusters of calls fell silent. The leopards had hunkered down to sleep out the day. We were close to the Jawai dam, and I thought a drive down to the lake might be interesting.

The landscape here is interesting. To my untrained eye there is a similarity between the look of this area and parts of Karnataka, for example, around Hampi. But the resemblance is superficial, nothing but the appearance of granite boulders. The rocks here are a respectable 750 million years (or so) old, having been created during the rifting of the ancient supercontinent of Rodinia. The Hampi region contains some of the oldest rocks in the world, perhaps as much as 3.5 billion years old. In parts that Dharwar craton is overlaid by the sprightly young Deccan shield, a slight 65 million year stripling. There is no geological resemblance between these rocks.

White-browed wagtail (*Motacilla maderaspatensis*)

The dinosaurs have not given up on this land that they claimed at birth. They may have evolved into what we call birds, but they still range over the lands from under which people dig out the fossil remains of their ancestral eggs. I saw wagtails and open bills after almost two years. Do they regret the end of the anthropause as much as I loved seeing them again?

A shoe? How could you lose one in this flat land? Did it fall out of a careless jeep? Or did it break during a long walk across these flats? A mystery.

Black-winged stilts

I recognize the black-winged stilt (Himantopus himantopus) pretty easily by its long red legs and the black wings on an otherwise white bird. Its name is highly appropriate. Interestingly, it is found across the world in a belt around the equator between about 40 degrees north and about that far south. Nor are they rare. I see them in the tidal waters around Mumbai whenever I’ve let myself get pretty rusty about waterbirds recently, but when we made a trip to Jamnagar, this was still one of the birds I remembered.

You can easily tell the difference between a male and a female: the male has glossy black wings, but the female has dark brown wings, like in the photo above. The very minor difference between the sexes means that they share the job of rearing their young. They usually stride about pretty confidently in shallow waters, so when I saw a female extract her toes from the water and wiggle it around, I knew that she was stirring up the water in the hope of bringing some insects to the surface, in order to pick it up in its long and elegant bill. It does plunge its head into the water sometimes, but it does that so seldom that I guess it is not something it really wants to do.

Some time back I found that birds sleep with half their brain at a time. Also, waders like to sleep out in the water, and retract the leg connected to the sleeping hemisphere of their brains. Ever since then I’ve had a little thrill of recognition when I find a bird standing on one leg. This one looked around once; there is really no human equivalent of this, but I could imagine me dozing on a railway platform and looking up sleepily at an odd noise.

First view of Lake Amboseli

Our first view of Lake Amboseli was enchanting. The lake is very shallow but extensive. We drove past rapidly, since our guide wanted to show us large mammals. But even in that quick pass I managed to take several photos. I didn’t want to stop longer because we still hadn’t got ourselves a field guide for the birds of Kenya, and we would not be able to identify what we saw. In retrospect that was a mistake, because we could have taken photos for later identification.

Looking at them later I discovered more than 15 species of birds. Here you see three plains zebras (Equus quagga) and a considerable number of greater and lesser flamingos (Phoenicopterus roseus and Phoenicopterus minor, respectively). If you look carefully at the photo you’ll see a black winged stilt (Himantopus himantopus) and a Blacksmith lapwing (Vanellus armatus). The last species is found only in Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope northwards to Angola in the west and Kenya in the east. Although it is common, this was a lifer. We’d seen the other three in India.