A Brown Shrike & A Starling

Another bird that I see on the wires near our house is the shrike. When I first noticed it the thought that came to my mind was..Oh, a bird with eye make up! It's a reddish brown bird and has a black line through eye to ear coverts. My book on birds tells me that it is a winter visitor throughout the subcontinent. Some stay on till June. Its diet consists of large insects, small birds, mammals, lizards.

Brown Shrike

Grey-headed starling

The Grey-headed starling is also known as the Chestnut-tailed starling

I'm seeing more of these birds now. The reason is that the Coral trees in our neighbourhood are in bloom and they are visited by several birds throughout the day. The Asian Pied starlings are more commonly seen than these Grey-headed ones. They come in pairs , are noisy but the bird chatter also includes delightful notes. They feed largely on berries, nectar and insects. ( The books that I refer to while writing some of my bird posts are: 
 1. The Book of Indian Birds by Dr. Salim Ali 2. Common Birds of the Indian Subcontinent.


To see more of our feathered friends visit World Bird Wednesday.

Nature Notes/ The Season's Bloomers

It's the dustiest period of the year. There's always a light wind blowing leaving that fine patina of dust on anything that can be called a surface. This is when we long for the rains, at least we'll get a respite from the dust. But outside there's a lot of colour. My small planting area near the front door has a mix of flowers. I put in a few calendulas, verbena, pansies, salvia, and zinnia. The idea was that a mixed area would attract different kinds of butterflies. But so far I've only had the cabbage whites and a few skippers on the blooms.

I had planted two kinds of bougainvillea near the gate. They grew really bushy so I pruned them severely last year. They don't look too bad now. The red flowers beyond these white and pink ones belong to the neighbouring house. It's the Corky Coral tree. Throughout the day, the tree is visited by myriad birds.

The red penta is the favourite haunt of lizards and sunbirds. The butterflies seem to love coming here only during the height of summer.

I'm so happy with the buds on my small azalea plant. Although I've had the plant for over four years now, this is only the second time that it's blooming. Maybe it has to do with the colder (than usual)  winter we've had. When I started blogging I longed to grow cold climate plants that I drooled over at all the wonderful gardening blogs. It took me some time (read failure and expenses) to realize that such experiences were futile. As for azaleas, only these dark pink ones seem to do well in our area.


To see what's happening in the world of nature, visit Michelle at Rambling Woods.

Birds At Pobitora

Last week I said that I'd be posting pictures of aquatic birds at Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary. As you can see from the picture above, the flat land has stretches of water and aquatic plants. Locally this kind of area is known as beel. The road has the beel on one side and rice fields on the other. It was a magical sight to see hundreds of ducks in flight as we headed towards the sanctuary. Below are some of the birds that I saw. There were more but the pictures weren't at all good.

Lesser Adjutant stork

The Lesser Adjutant Stork's main nesting area is said to be the north-eastern region. My book of birds says that it's normally solitary and its diet consists of fish, frog, reptiles and invertebrates.

Little Cormorant

Can you spot the doves? As we were returning I saw a pair of Spotted doves on this tree. Egrets, herons, the bronze-winged jacana, water hens, and hundreds of ducks were what we saw.

Closer home, the most common birds such as the bulbul, crows, mynas, and the drongo (pictured above) were feeding on the nectar of the blooms on the Corky Coral tree.


This post is for World Bird Wednesday.

Nature Notes/Birds at Pobitora

Ducks in flight at Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary

I'm a day late in posting. With the marriage season in full swing there are quite a few social commitments. Hence the delay. I'm sharing two pictures from our Sunday trip (details in my last post). I've never seen so many birds at any point anywhere. This was my first so you can imagine the excitement. The first picture shows ducks in flight. There were hundreds of them. The wetlands surrounding this nature park is a haven for migratory birds. This year's census was conducted in January by the Assam Forest Department and an environmental organisation. The week-long survey ended on January 29, 2012. According to the survey there were 12,000 birds of 26 species at Pobitora. The second photo shows a kingfisher on the wires, and beyond that are hundreds of ducks, herons, egrets, water hens, and storks. The migratory birds stay on till it gets warm. The last of them leave by March. I'm glad we made that trip. This is surely a sight that I'll remember for a long time.


To see more in the world of nature, visit Michelle at Rambling Woods.

WBW/ Birds On The Silk Cotton Trees

For this week's post I headed to Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary to see the birds and the Silk Cotton trees in bloom. Although we see these trees in the city, seeing them in the wild without the posts, pylons, and the wires of human habitation, makes it extra special. The drive (my husband was at the wheel) is beautiful. We passed through small villages and rice fields. In the distance were the low hills that's a feature of this area. Nearly every kilometre stretch had either the Coral Tree/Erythrina stricta var. suberosa or the Silk Cotton trees/Bombax ceiba in bloom. In some places there were several clumps all in full bloom. Ideally I'd have loved to spend the entire day under those gorgeous trees but we had another commitment...But it was a morning well  spent. The distance was about 45 kms but it was at such a leisurely pace that we went, stopping wherever there were birds and blooming trees.

I'm afraid I haven't been able to identify the birds in the first two photos. The same birds are seen in my seventh photo also. The bill is blue. I think I'll need to spend more time with my latest buy, The Book Of Indian Birds by Salim Ali.

The Jungle Myna

Although the Jungle Myna doesn't look very different from the Common Myna, it's most prominent feature is the tuft of feathers on its forehead. These birds usually keep away from human habitation. They are largely omnivorous feeding on grasshoppers, other insects, wild figs, berries, and nectar.

Silk Cotton tree in full bloom

I would like to quote from Salim Ali's book regarding birds in connection with these trees.

Some of the most charming and enjoyable venues for bird watching are certainly afforded by the Silk Cotton, Coral Flower, or Flame of the Forest(Butea) trees in bloom. Their particular attractiveness lies in the fact that the trees, or the branches bearing the gorgeous flowers, are bare and leafless at this season, allowing a clear and unobstructed view of the visitors. Almost every small bird of the surrounding countryside flocks to the blossoms for the sake of the sugary nectar which they produce in such abundance.

Wonderfully sweet moments for the Asian Pied Starling 

Pobitora is most famous for its rhinos and the periphery of the park is low-lying. In our region, the low-lying areas are usually flooded during the rainy season. But in the dry season there are stretches of water with dense growth of aquatic plants in between. So hundreds of birds are always seen here. We had a field day watching the ducks, the storks, and several other aquatic species. I'll be posting those pictures next week.

A blurry picture of the Red-vented bulbul feeding on the blooms of the Corky Coral tree in our neighbourhood.

I hope you've enjoyed going through the pictures. Although there were several other species, they were too fast for me!:( Who knows what I might be able to capture on the blooms of the Silk Cotton trees next year?! It's a thought that makes me feel really g-o-o-d!

To see more of our feathered friends, click here.

Nature Notes/ A New Find!

It's not every morning that you wake up to see this kind of news on the pages of our newspapers.The Telegraph had this picture on its front page this morning. These leg-less amphibians are known as Caecilians. 


Caecilians (pronounced seh-SILL-yens) are tropical amphibians that look like large worms or slick snakes. They have no arms or legs, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which end is the head and which is the tail! Their shiny skin is ringed with skin folds called annuli, and they usually come in shades of gray, brown, black, orange, or yellow. Some species have tiny, fish-like scales within the rings. Source.


Some excerpts from the newspaper.


The scientists from the University of Delhi and their counterparts from Belgium and the UK have announced their discovery in a paper that appears today in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The new family of Caecilians, given the name Chikilidae, is genetically closer to African caecilians than to other legless amphibians  found so far across peninsular India.


S.D. Biju, India's leading amphibian researcher, and his PhD student Rachunliu Kamei, discovered the new family during a search for amphibians in the northeast between 2006 to 2010. The search yielded more than five hundred caecilians at 58 sites among the 238 localities surveyed.


The scientists classified the Chiklidae as a new family after studies revealed that these creatures have a distinctive morphology and a unique position on the genetic tree of amphibians.


Looking up the internet I came across more pictures and details. You might like to take a look here and here.


And in other news I'm happy to see bees and butterflies around my flowers.

Looks like this one's in a drunken stupor!:)

Butterfly on a calendula

Dahlias and an Orchid tree blooming in a garden attached to a local Cultural Centre.

The flowering trees of Spring are just beginning to put on a show. Soon our landscape will be ablaze with fiery reds and oranges. Here's a closer look at the bloom of the Orchid tree (below).

This is my contribution to Michelle's Nature Notes. Check out the signs of the season by clicking on the link. I wish all nature lovers a wonderful week!!

WBW/ White-breasted kingfisher

Although I haven't been posting I had taken quite a few shots of birds over the past few weeks. A White-breasted kingfisher often comes and sits on the wires close to our house. Usually I manage a blurry blue with my camera but the other day I happened to be on the balcony upstairs and as luck would have it the kingfisher landed on the wires. I got enough time to get these shots. It's amazing to see the beak from close quarters despite knowing that kingfishers are meant to be that way....


To see more of our feathered friends, click here.

.