Sunday, June 30, 2013

Valley School

Last weekend we went to Valley school. This time it was special since after a very long time Prashant and Nagaraj sir joined the walk. Since we planned for a short walk we decided to visit valley school which doesn't take lot of time.

Prashanth picked me up at 6PM. Once we took a deviation from Kanakpura road towards Valley school we saw couple of Grey Francolins. They gave us a good view but we could not take any photographs since the light was bad. We continued ahead and stoppped to look at the White Browed Bulbul. There we stopped for sometime and saw few Ashy wood swallows. Within sometime Raghu and Nagaraj sir joined us. And in no time even Ajit joined us.

After completing the formalities of making an entry to the birding visitors list we proceeded on the road adjacent to the school. Ajit and Prashant got busy with trees identifying them with their scientific names and enjoying the beauty of the trees. I still dont understand how they manage to remember the scientific names of most of the trees. Its just amazing. Along with trees identifying skills of Ajit with butterflies is also awesome. Raghu and Nagaraj sir were busy photographing a Flowerpecker.

Next our first good sighting of the day was Blue Faced Malkoha. Infact there were 2 of them. We got good look of them but not much of photographing opportunity.There were lot of Coppersmith Barbets around. They gave us company whole morning with their beautiful calls. White cheeked Barbets were less in number when compared with Coppersmith Barbets. While looking for birds we heard a very familiar sound not a bird call:-) Everyone knew there was a woodpecker around. They turned out to be a Flameback woodpeckers, couple of them. Its just amazing the how loud the pecking is. Amazing sighting for the morning. It took lot of days to see my first woodpecker but
 not it seems like I'm on a roll :-) The Woodpeckers are beautiful and the frequency at which they have to hit the wood is just amazing.

Our next spotting were couple of Small Minivets. They seemed very restless this morning. Hopping from one branch to the other. We saw large group of butterflies there. We managed to see Orange tips and Crimson tip butterflies there. This was my first time to observe a Crimson tipped butterly.

After that Malkohas decided to give us another visit. While we were there we could hear peacocks call all the time. We entered the forest there for sometime and were able to observe lot of butterflies inside but not many birds.

Tried Raghu's Raynox adapter for the first time and immediately fell in love with it. Amazing piece of equipment to get macro photos.

Some of the photos from the trip are below.


















 

2 comments:

  1. Nice pics Srinivas! Your mention of the Raynox equipment has triggered an interest. It is a fascinating piece of equipment. Did you get any more macro shots?

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    1. Thank you Micheal. That is the only photo I took from my friends Raynox adapter.

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