Birds of India #38 - Oriental Darter

Here's wishing all our blogger friends Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year!

We close this year with a post on the Oriental Darter or the Indian Darter, which is the only species of the Darter found in India. Wikipedia indicates its conservation status as "near threatened". The Darter is a wetland bird with a long neck, which it can turn in literally any direction. Because of this unique capability, it is also known as the snakebird.

Here is a collection of images of this beautiful species. They have been taken with the 300mm f2.8 lens. At times we have used the 2x TC as well. Both the D300 and the D80 have been used to take these images.

Birds of India #37 - Crested Hawk Eagle

We have seen the Crested / Changeable Hawk Eagle (CHE) many times in the Indian wilderness and every sighting has provided some beautiful photo opportunities. We put together many of our sightings in our first post here. Our second post to include a CHE was in the series titled "If looks could kill". And the most popular post on the CHE was the one where it made an unsuccessful hunt.

Here's our latest sighting of this handsome raptor. This time we spotted the beautiful bird next to the jeep tracks as we were exiting the Bandipur forest. We were fortunate to observe it searching for its prey on the ground and within the minimum focusing distance of our 300mm f2.8 lens mounted with the 2x TC. This forced us to take most of our images with the D80 mounted with the 18-200mm lens, except for the first image below.

Animals of India #25 : Stripe-necked Mongoose

The stripe-necked Mongoose is the largest amongst Asian Mongooses and is found in Southern India and Sri Lanka. Our earlier post on this beauty is one of our favorites on 'Walk the Wilderness'.

We have almost always sighted a stripe-necked Mongoose during our safaris into the South Indian jungles. However this time around we were fortunate enough to catch this fellow relishing his morning meal of Dung Beetle, at a pile of Elephant Dung.

Here's a collection of images taken with the D300, 300mm f2.8 lens mounted with the 2x TC.

Birds of India #36 - Grey Junglefowl

The Grey Junglefowl is the wild relative of the domestic fowl found in India. This endemic species is a widespread resident found in the forests of the Indian Peninsula. Their natural habitat is the forest undergrowth and bamboo thickets.

It is very common to hear the loud calls of these birds during early mornings and at dusk. They constantly move around foraging the forest floor for grains, seeds and tiny insects. The Grey Junglefowl get easily spooked at the slightest disturbance. This coupled with the fact that they rarely standstill make them a pretty challenging subject to photograph.

Here is a collection of images of this very restless bird. All images are taken at 600mm focal length with the D300, 300mm f2.8 lens mounted with the 2x TC.