Here are some photographs from Yosemite taken during the last weekend.



( Nine photographs )

On the path to Bridalveil falls in Yosemite, I came across a Y-shaped tree with a rather unique shadow formation which made it look like an Ent from Fangorn forest or at least like a human face.

Let me know if you think otherwise... :)

What's the difference between the photograph below and the thousands I've shot before? If someone asked me where this photograph was taken then I would say, "Yosemite National Park in California at a place called Tunnel View which is on Highway 41." -- I could be more verbose but imagine all that being replaced by just giving out the latitude and longitude of the place where the photograph was taken. All I'd have to do then is find it on a map.





Geographic information can be embedded into photographs and that is known as geocoding. It is popular with photo sharing sites like Flickr which allow photographs to be dragged onto a map to be geo-tagged. However, if you happen to have one of the modern digital cameras like the Nikon D300, then you can take photographs with geographic information in them at the time of shooting. For example, the image above has this information embedded:
    Latitude: N 37° 42' 55.98"
    Longitude: W 119° 40' 37.068"
    Altitude: 1329 meters

I'm not sure if any cameras have built-in GPS units today, but I think we're soon going to have matchbox-sized cameras with just that. For now, it's a fairly expensive and a cumbersome way of doing things. First, you'll need a camera which supports GPS input and there aren't too many of those in the Digital SLR world. Then you'll need a GPS unit and a few special connecting cables...


( This is what I have... )

I was going through my archives and I saw some interesting photographs that I had not processed before! I think I might have said something like that before as well. Strangely, some photographs I don't process immediately after a trip seem to look beautiful after such a long time. Here are two of such photographs...


( Indian Wild Dogs on a kill. Warning: Gory )




( Indian Gray Mongoose )

This morning, I was out in the hills looking for some birds and I came across two White-tailed Kites in the early stages of their courtship ritual. The male (I think), first flew around in large circles beating its wings rapidly -- this is apparently called "butterfly-flapping" and then the female (I think) made an appearance in the other kite's airspace. They seemed to be chasing each other around but our attention was now on the turkeys below so we missed out some part of the ritual, but I'm glad I got focus on of kites just when one of the birds came out of the grasslands with a vole(?) and started moving around. The female(?) then rapidly flew towards the male and in mid-air the female took the vole from the male... an awesome sight. And captured on film flash memory.




( Two photographs of the White-tailed Kites )



Interesting information: This Kite was called the American Black-Shouldered Kite before they changed the name to "White-tailed Kite." In India we have a kite which looks very very similar and was originally called "Black-winged Kite" and they now changed the common name of the Indian species to "Black-shouldered Kite" -- common names? :)

While I was busy photographing the bald eagles last week, I also had some luck with a few other birds which I haven't had a chance to photograph before... fun!


( The common and the not so common )

I went to the hills close to my apartment this afternoon and there were these two eagles of some sort.


( Pictures of whatever Haliaeetus leucocephalus means )

While the Racetrack on the Northern part of Death Valley is mysterious with difficult accessibility, the southern and central part of the national park is what most people who visit the park see. If you look up at Flickr or do an image search, you'll probably end up with a million of identically composed photographs you're about to see... Anyway, here's what I saw. :)



( Nine photographs )

One of the targets on the second trip to Death Valley was to find wildlife. Death Valley has many famous inhabitants and the Chuckwalla is one of them. It is a lizard in the Iguana family and does a bunch of crazy things. It hibernates during the cold winters and when threatened, it slips into rock crevices and pumps itself up so that it cannot be pulled out. While walking along in the Titus canyon, I was keeping my eye out in the hope of seeing one of these and there it was, basking in the midday sun. It was about twenty feet high and surprisingly, there was a fairly easy bunch of rocks around which I could climb to get eye-level to the lizard. I didn't want to scare him (her?) away into the rocks, so I took my time in trying to get close to it. It was wary of me and was all set to run away, but after minutes of seeing me, it decided I wasn't a threat and put on a good show.

Pictures behind the cut, don't click if snakes and lizards make you queasy. :)




( 4 photographs of the Chuckwalla )

This one is almost Science fiction. Death Valley National Park was once a part of a gigantic eighty mile long lake and it was a fresh water lake, fed by the melting glaciers of the last ice age. In this gigantic lake lived various fish and the lakes shores may have had prehistoric mammals like the saber-tooth tiger, mastodons and other megafauna. Just thirteen thousand years later, which really like like a blink of an eye in terms of evolution, the huge lake was gone and became a desert floor. The remnants of the lake became saline and animals stopped coming to the lake for water and almost every fish became extinct. Everything except the pupfish - which rapidly evolved to adapt to live in the saltwater. They still do, in small ponds, smaller than standard swimming pools! This is the Saratoga springs Pupfish which is found only in this tiny pool of water and surrounding couple of pools of similar size! Not great photographs or video, but this made me feel special to be seeing almost the whole world's population of a species of fish!









( A photograph of the pupfish and a professional video )

A Playa is "a dry lakebed, generally the shore of, or a remnant of, an endorheic lake." There are a lot of Playas around the world and the largest of them are thousands of square kilometers huge. The Racetrack Playa in the Death Valley national park is the most famous of them for its mysterious moving rocks. Various hypotheses on how the rocks move have come forward but the all of still them remain just that - a hypothesis and no one really knows who or what moves them. Maybe there's still so much to learn for Science... And apparently, after so many years since its discovery no one has seen the stones move or even filmed it.




Tracks on the ground and in the sky (Notice the trail left by a US airforce jet in the sky)




( More photographs... )





Here's more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racetrack_Playa

It may be one of the hottest, driest places on the planet, but there are some places in the park which have water for a most of the year and even through the year. This is Darwin falls...







( Two more )

I just got back from one of those awesome places on Earth! "Middle of nowhere" would be a pretty accurate description.



That is me at daybreak on a Playa - the flattest of all natural surfaces.


More later...

Like I wrote before, the weather at Point Reyes was like four seasons in one day! The beautiful play of light at various times of the day was just beautiful. Here are some photographs from the day.




The Drakes Beach. A much bigger version behind the cut.

( More photographs from Point Reyes )

Yesterday, I had an appointment with the Elephant seals at Point Reyes. These huge pinnipeds were actually much smaller than I had imagined them to be but it was awesome to see these fascinating creatures. Rain was predicted through the day but I took the gamble and headed out to Point Reyes. There was wind and rain and sometimes clear blue skies. At Point Reyes itself it was a beautiful day of clear blue skies with menacing rain clouds out in the Pacific. And the weather would change so often that it was weird. It would rain hard, then settle to a gentle drizzle, then the winds would kick in and there would be brilliant sunshine cutting through the copious cloud cover.

We first arrived at Drakes Beach and there was a signboard warning us of not getting too close to the seals but there weren't any that were visible. Just then we saw something out in the waves hitting on an unusually placed rock in the middle of the beach and the rock moved... Elephant Seal! The seal, perhaps a male, was moving north and he was using the edge of the water to drag himself along the shore. Apparently, aggressive males can move quickly enough to outrun humans over short distances but this one wasn't even interested in look at us.

We then moved over to the Chimney area, where there's an overlook to watch the breeding colony. That place had a lot more seals and young pups. A bunch of volunteers there had their scopes set on the main action - one on the young pups, one of the HUGE beach master (the male that "owns" and controls the beach) and the younger male who had challenged and been chased away! And though we had some good looks at the seals, it was virtually useless for good photographs.

I really wanted at least a couple of photographs of the seal, so we headed back to Drakes beach and from one of the high vista points, I scanned the seashore for the seals. About a mile north, there seemed to be one lying on the beach, but it looked so similar to a rock that I wasn't sure. I decided to give it a shot anyways and walked up along the beautiful Point Reyes coastline towards the seal. And like I had guessed, there were two young males on the beach! There were a bunch of volunteers there who told us to keep good distance from the seals because some of the seals were getting scared and moving back to the water when humans approached them. However, the distance they asked us to keep was well within the range of my cameras... so I did manage to photograph them. The seals were curious but didn't care about our presence as they enjoyed a beautiful day on the beach...




A youg male yawning...

( Ten more photographs of the Seals )

I realized that when I'm out looking for animals, I click much less - a lot of time is spent finding, stalking and playing games with the animals before I get something. Death Valley is picturesque at every corner and traveling in the desert for the first time meant looking at a lot of new things. I did not see any animals, save for a bunch of ravens, sparrows and the odd desert rabbit but the place is stunningly beautiful and... quiet. I love such places.

While we were driving from Stovepipe Wells to Scotty's Castle, I was beginning to get a feeling that I'm not going to have a single good animal photograph on the trip and as I looked out of the window I saw a strange cloud formation. Did it really look like a crocodile behind the mountains or was I hallucinating? Anyway... tell me what you see in the photograph below. :)



Croc in the Valley!






( Bigger croc image + a lot more... )

There were just a little too many landscape shots on this trip than I'm usually accustomed to. However, these are just very very average photographs compared to what I've seen people do with landscapes of death valley - it takes a lot of visits, the right conditions and the right time of the year. On the last evening of the trip at the Panamint inn on the western edge of the park, I was astonished to see the restaurant walls adorned with such stunning photographs of death valley that it made me feel that I should go there many times to see all the beauty that is hidden there. Meanwhile, this is how I saw Death Valley when I went there...


( Six photographs from Death Valley )

The sun showed up this afternoon after bunking most of the week and I decided to head out for a short drive in the hills. Based on the luck I've had of late with wildlife sightings, I wasn't hoping to get much. The narrow and winding Calveras road begins just at the end of the CA-237 freeway in Milpitas. I stopped at the four-way stop sign and entered the super-narrow road, and I saw a huge bird swooping on something in the barn beside the road. Could it be a.... Yes! A Golden Eagle!! I was scared I'd do something awful on the road with excitement as I watched it through the corner of my eye trying to look for a pullout - the eagle the flew towards me and went just overhead into the city streets! Unfortunately, there were no-parking signs all over and there was no way to turn the car around as well. So, two Golden Eagles in a week, both times on an empty road but no way to stop!

Anyway, I looked around the place for other interesting wildlife and there were a lot of them today - perhaps enjoying the sun as well, but none to photograph. But I did manage to get a Red-tail Hawk.


( Photograph of the Red-tailed Hawk )

I made a trip to the Death Valley national park over the weekend. It was my first time in a desert and that place is beautiful in its own unique way. Too bad I didn't read up much about the place before I went there, but I'm glad I could make that trip. I should write more about it when I get some time...

( Four photographs from the park... )

It's the end of yet another lazy weekend. I finished the book I was reading, cleaned up the house, did laundry and even had some time to get out for a bit of birding and photography. I headed out to the Shoreline lake in Mountain View this afternoon to catch some sun after a week of stormy weather. There are two trails about half a mile apart from each other - one in Palo Alto called the Charleston Slough and the other in Shoreline lake in Mountain View. I've noticed that the birds - sparrows and ducks - in the Charleston Slough area are very shy and just scoot as soon as they've seen us whereas the birds in the Shoreline lake don't care how close you are to them. Today, the ducks, coots and sparrows were so close that I could really reach out and catch them. It was a little too close for photography but being able to watch them from so close is more fun than photography itself!

( Shoreline lake and some birds )

So, the most of the Saturday was spent walking on a trail along the Coyote creek just south of where I live. Vivek, Prasad and I were doing a bird count for the county and like always I had my camera in my backpack just in case I had a need to use it. For the first hour or so, I didn't even bother pulling out my camera, but when I had my first lifer, I just had to pull it out to get a shot and like it always happens, the camera never went back into the backpack!

I think I'm finally getting used to the extra weight, speed and control of the D300 and I certainly improved my ratio of the good shots to the bad ones. It was cold, windy and drizzling at times and those are about the conditions that this camera seems to pull away from the other ones. Over the day, I managed to get several life birds and got lucky with a few as well. So, here are my last photographs of the fantastic 2007.



( 8 photographs )

Today was cold, windy, cloudy and generally dark and gloomy. Not all that great for photography then? Not if you have one of the new Nikon DSLRs it seems. So, I drove up to Ed Levin county park near Milpitas in the hope of at least finding something to shoot. The first thing I needed to get used to was the extra weight of the camera and then the controls. The Nikon interface is fairly consistent and those were easy to get a hang of, but I'm still fiddling with the ideal settings I want. The D300 comes with a lot of extras like LiveView mode, Active D-lighting, the 51-point focusing and so on but I'll save those for a sunny day. Today's test run was all about shooting in high ISO. And I did manage to get some birds which I hand not photographed in the US before...


( Bird Photographs (4) )

It's been a few hours since I've got a D300 in my hands and all I can say is that it is a fantastic machine. The things I find most useful are autofocus speed and burst rate - it is quick and 8fps is just amazing! The 12 megapixel, wider ISO range and the super-cool LCD are a big bonus.

The 14-bit color mode is a little tricky and I've not been able to get it working with Nikon Editor, which means that I'll have spend more to get CaptureNX. I have to use the Capture NX they shipped with D300! Awesome. :)

I'll have to play around some more with it, but feels just like a D2x. :)

( First shot: A sparrow )

It is Elk rutting season and there were boards advising people to keep distance and avoid approaching them. Obviously, they are peaked up for a duel and we unarmed humans would be squashed without mercy if one of those big males thinks we are intruding on his territory. Seeing them for the first time in real life was exciting, but I wished there were more hours of the day left when I first caught a glimpse of them.



( 7 photographs )

This afternoon I headed out for a walk in the Palo Alto baylands. Birdwatching or photography was not on the menu, but just a long nice walk in the cool afternoon breeze. It was a wonderful way to end a long week and interestingly I had some lifers for my bird list. Anyway, I did manage to snap a couple of birds as well.



( Sparrows and Ducks )

I woke up yesterday with a nasty cold and decided I'll get to office when it got better, but it only got worse during the day and I ended up having to skip work and stay at home. Anyway, it did get a little better towards the evening and I was able to go to a bookstore and pick up a couple of books for the weekend.

I was going through some of the photographs I had taken last December around Bangalore and found them interesting, so here they are:



( A frog and a squirrel )

We went to Point Reyes yesterday afternoon for a quick trip. It was already late in the afternoon and I wasn't expecting to see too much of wildlife activity around there at that time. At the first turnout, I pulled over to pull out my camera from the boot and noticed a small plump bird sitting on a fence. Raptors usually sit out on open perches like that and the size looked good for a Kestrel, or a Merlin! It was rather far away and I really couldn't make out much even with my camera. So, the stalking began and with each zooming car along the highway the chances of getting close to the bird were going away. Thankfully, I did manage to get close enough and guess what? California Quail! I've been looking for these little rascals for a long time and they always show themselves when my camera is packed up or there's no way to get a photograph of them.

As we drove along, I saw something that looked like a medium-sized cat, but looking against the sun meant that I could only see the silhouette and it could have very well been a stone with some shrubs around it. Unfortunately the traffic was so bad, like it usually is on all weekends, that we couldn't stop or turn around to check it out. Point Reyes has a population of non-native deer and there are plans to exterminate them. However, we humans seem to love our laws of Physics, especially the one talking about every action having an equal and opposite reaction and there have been strong protests from animal rights activists against the program. Anyway, the most common deer species around there are the Fallow Deer and I parked in a turn out trying to get some shots at it. I think these deer are used to getting guns pointed at them because when I pulled up my camera, they seemed to dash away in the opposite direction as fast as they could!

The final animal of the trip was a bit of a surprise. You don't get to see them during the daytime but I guess it was out because the winter nights were getting a little too cold. Anyway, I was so close to it that if it had wished to come at me, I'd be wounded badly but he went about his business and I kept that low-profile non-threatening approach which made him go out his business of digging out rodents.

( The photographs... )

I've never tried to seriously photograph a Corvid. They are so common that it rarely makes people go after it for a photograph. Even yesterday when an American crow landed right next to me (in the hope of getting something to eat perhaps) I wasn't too keen on taking a photograph. Anyway, I did manage to get a bunch of photographs and they are a little surprising indeed.

( Three images of the Crow )

Thanksgiving day was spent hiking and wandering in Yosemite. I've been lucky with Blue Grouse before and yesterday was the best of the sightings. I first noticed two of them right next to the road and since the birds were on the passenger side I had to drive slowly around them and park in the next turnout. It was freezing outside and Yosemite roads see a lot of a traffic, especially on a big weekend, and it was only a matter of time before the next car zoomed past the birds sending them into hiding. Getting close enough without scaring them is half the job in taking a forest bird photograph. The other half is spotting them! It was fun stalking them. First I had to sit on the ground far away from them while they looked at me and became aware of an alien in their country. Then I had move sideways without making eye contact and moving as slowly as possible without any quick movements. And then when I was close enough, it was time to gain their confidence once more so that I can lift my camera and take their photographs. It took minutes to even get to them and I was just hoping no car comes by on that very busy road up to one of Yosemite's most famous vantage points. However, I managed to take a bunch of photographs till the next car came by sending the birds flying down the mountain just as I had expected!



( Four photographs of the Blue Grouse )



Oh, before I forget, this bird is now called the Sooty Grouse because the "Blue Grouse" was split into two species, Dusky Grouse and Sooty Grouse, last year.

Just because I was at home all weekend, I had some time to look back at some of the photographs that I took earlier in the year. I'm not sure if I'm posted them before, but here they are:




Fair game? River tern fight. One tern caught a fish for its chick and the other snatched it. It's not easy fishing in these crocodile infested waters, but the terns must fish to live on.

( Tern portrait and an Elephant )

Bitterns are these crazy bunch of birds. For starters they love to be not seen and prefer tall reed where they blend in perfectly. And then they usually feed at dusk or dawn (or at night?) and hence as rarely seen. We do get a few bitterns in India but I've never seen one even though my list of birds seen in India is a decent one. I guess the destiny was to see an American Bittern first - which looks so similar to one our Indian ones that if I posted this as an Indian bird, many people would probably not complain.

( Photographs of the bittern and a comical looking duck! )

Is it just me, or the birds? I noticed that a majority of my favorite bird photographs feature birds looking left. I have quite a few photographs of birds looking right, but they don't seem to be as appealing to me as the ones looking left. For example, if I have photographed a bird looking in both directions I seem to favor the one looking left. Also, whenever I draw something, I usually draw them facing left. Weird, but maybe there's a reason for it or is it just that I noticed it today?


I have three more photographs that I took over the week and all feature birds, as usual, looking left. Featuring in this post are a Snowy Egret, a Song Sparrow and a Turkey vulture. Be warned that the vulture has blood on its face and beak.

( The photographs )

I made a quick trip to the Palo Alto baylands this afternoon. The weather was great and I needed a nice long walk along the shores as well. The usual birds were there in attendance, but nothing new to me as far as my bird list was concerned. However, I did get some interesting photographs.

( The fisherbirds... )

I just read one of the most fantastic write-ups on tigers in India. These are the kind of stories that brighten anyone's day - especially the last line on that post! :)
    http://vijaycavale.blogspot.com/2007/10/nature-lovers-tiger-tale.html

I created a syndicated account on LJ, so if you any of you want to follow vijaycavale's blog you can add this account:
    http://syndicated.livejournal.com/vijaycavale/profile

My cameras have been resting for a while and so I took them out for a small trip to Alviso. It is a quiet little place a couple of miles away from where I live and has some wonderful shoreline trails. Lots of interesting wild life there (in the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge) but most of the birds keep their distance from the shores. Anyway, I managed to get just a couple of photographs of a Great Egret, which we get in India as well.

( Photograph of the Egret )

I was reading up about marine mammals today and I just had to try and draw the cetaceans that I've seen so far. Naturally, I've just seen a small fraction of their bodies most times except for that one time when a Humpback breached, but that was like milliseconds. At times, I really wonder how it is going to be to actually do some underwater photography. I'd probably need to learn to dive for that, but the real problem could be to actually get underwater housing for my camera, getting permits and then finding someone to take me there. I guess that's a little too much, so I'll stick to drawings for now...

( Humpback Whale and Grey Dolphin )

It was a packed weekend. The Saturday was spent out in the sea and around it and on Sunday it was the high Sierra! The colors in Yosemite are changing and the seasonal waterfalls are now just a trickle. The Tioga pass road will be closed in a month and will remain inaccessible through the heavy winter and that meant I just had to drive up that road. It was an exciting trip and I managed to add a few more species to the my wildlife list, some excepted and some unexpected.


Here are are some photographs from the quick trip.







( More photographs... )

I had the opportunity to get back to Monterey over the weekend and this time it was out to sea to in the hope to watch some whales. It was supposed to rain that day and for once the weather guys got it right and it rained all the way during the drive from San Jose to Monterey and it rained when got on to the boat. The sky was gray and the waters seemed not all that still unlike last time. So, we traveled for more than an hour into the ocean, some fourteen miles from land and still there was no signs of those elusive mammals. And then we caught the distinctive sight of presence of whales - gulls and other sea birds hovering around close to the surface waiting to pick leftovers of a successful whale hunt. An association of Humpbacked Whales. Three of them.

It wasn't as spectacular as the last time when the whales put on a show, but seeing and hearing them again in the wild was exciting. However, we did see another type of whales after a while...


( Photographs and more... )

A month has ended and so has my luxurious stay with the company sponsored apartment and rental car. So, now I'm in my new apartment waiting for things to arrive from India and I hear that they may be here as soon as the day after. Perfect timing.

The new apartment is actually better located than I had originally imagined. The closest route to office via the freeways is about 6.5 miles and takes about 10 minutes in a car during non-peak hours. The original route I planned to take for the bike was about 8 miles and along major roads and even a bit of an express way. However, I found a bike route map of the area in our office (They encourage use of public transport and bikes by giving out free passes and other goodies) and figured out a much shorter route - about 6 miles. The good part about that is I'll have to use class II bike paths (regular roads with a bike lane) for only about two miles and the remaining four miles is a class I bike path (no motor-driven vehicles allowed!). Aaannnd the best part - all the four miles is next to the wetlands which means I can watch birds all along the way, everyday! It was so awesome in the morning with the pelicans and waders putting on a show and it got much better in the evening when I, for the very first time, saw the awesome "grebes running on water" show just like in the "Life of Birds" DVD. Just spectacular and must be seen live to believe it!

More about the biking. The six miles took me a little less than half and hour. Not bad because it was rather windy today and I was biking easy trying to catch a glimpse of those fascinating birds that may show up along the bay once in a while. The biking on the class II bike paths is rather scary as always, especially when a huge truck drives past you in the next lane like it happened today. And I noticed that I tend to ride much slowly on these roads since most cars are doing a good 50mph and each time they whiz past you, the wind actually pushes you a bit and the uneven road surface (like on the last stretch near office) makes it difficult to control the road bikes.



The bike path I take to work

( Another photograph of the bike path next the freeway )

So, a bunch of friends from work and I decided to head south on CA-1 towards Monterey and Big Sur. There was always time for birds and I did manage to photograph a few of them.

( The birds... and a Squirrel )

Finally, I got some time to head out to one of my favourite places around here - twice in two days! The first trip was mostly a photography one and I managed to get some of the usual ones there and today morning was all about biking around the deserted and extensive trails! The biking trip was mostly to see other parts of the preserve which I've not had time to see so far and scout for places to visit the next time I head out with my binoculars and camera gear. Hours of cycling can be tedious and I think I should have remembered to leave my bag at home because the back really hurts when you're riding for a long time on a road bike.

( +4 photographs of birds )

I realized I had more interesting mammals from the Vienna zoo. Here's a bat, a Coypu and a porcupine on the tree!

( photographs )

It's been more than a month since I went to Tiergarten Schönbrunn(the Vienna Zoo), but I never had the time to actually go back and take a look at the images. Here are some of my favourites - because I have just hoping to catch some of them in the wild, but I at least got to see them in the zoo. So, that means the next time I'm in the Indian jungles, I have a slightly better idea of what they really look like... :)

( Five images from the zoo )

The general belief is that spiders are vicious loners. At least the most famous and notorious ones are definitely loners, but while talking to some friends recently, I heard about some spiders that are not loners and actually live in large groups, hunt and share food cooperatively! And following an interesting post of a picture of a social spider colony on a nature forum, a bunch of us set out this morning to actually track down a spider web in the outskirts of Bangalore. That's as good a bet as finding a needle in a haystack.

After an hour of the mad Bangalore traffic we landed on a narrow muddy road leading to a small patch of forest. I can't remember having been to a place so deseretd and so close to Bangalore in the recent past. There was just one farmer ploughing his fields on his tractor and he was rather curious as to what the three of us were doing in no-man's land. As we were driving through the Eucalyptus grove next to the fields, we managed to catch sight of a small white web on the ground and off we went to investigate. There are other spiders which build similar webs but they are loners as well and fairly large and all of us had seen quite a few of those. So, looking close we first saw one tiny spider at the entrance of the funnel-like web and soon we saw dozens (hundreds?) of spiders inside the web. Isn't that great? We actually managed to find that needle-in-a-haystack!


Too bad that I missed my macro lens for the close-ups, but the telephoto lens managed fairly decent documentation shots of the spiders.



( Warning: Images of Spiders inside )

Ah! I've been super busy since I got back from Europe. Back in India, I went on a driving trip of sorts over the weekend, but with parents, so that meant speed restrictions and music restrictions as usual -- but was fun. The rivers in the monsoons can be awfully powerful even if they look to be quite placid. My swimming's a bit rusty, but I think it does not matter if you have no gills.

So, about the Europe trip. And here's the summary: First two days in Dresden. Third day on a wonderful train journey from Dresden to Vienna through the Czech Republic. Days four and five in Vienna. Day six was the train journey back to Dresden. Day seven was a cloudy, rainy day in Dresden and a perfect setting to do some sketching and reading about art after all those inspirational visits to those spectacular galleries. And day eight was the most boring one - full day travel to get back home. So, I've stopped telling people I went to Europe, instead I tell them that I went to Vienna and Dresden. And the funny look on their faces: Dresden? What's that!?

Anyway, Vienna is a very very beautiful city. I'm not much of a city photographer or even a city lover, but I did walk around that city with the camera around my neck and clicked a few shots. Like always, photographs are just a very poor substitute to the experience of actually being out there - be it in the wild or in a city.

Here are some photographs that I managed to take in the end.




St Stephen's Cathedral (Stephansdom)

( More )

A little while after I got into serious wildlife-ing and birding I began to notice a strange pattern with respect to distribution of wet-zone (rain forest) birds. There were some species found only in the western ghats close the western coast of the peninsular India and over a thousand kilometers away in the North East Indian hills. It didn't seem all that strange at first, birds have wings after all and are known to embark upon long-distance migrations. And then, I heard about the distribution of the King Cobra -- again found only in the western ghats, the Himalayan foothills and North East India and beyond. That seemed strange because of the large distance between the two places. Just how did the distribution happen?


Apparently, I was not the first to notice that. That question has baffled biologists for centuries and there have been some excellent hypotheses put forth to explain the strange distribution. And with my limited knowledge about wildlife and biology, I had a handful of species belonging to this category, but there were hundreds who had this strange distribution pattern. After some reading and talking to some excellent people in this field, here are some of my findings.

( Maps and models )

Vast areas of Mizoram is bamboo forest, some natural and some degraded (meaning originally not a bamboo forest). Dampa tiger reserve is a 500 sq. KM forest and is a beautiful little place tucked away in a corner of the vast Indian sub-continent and not many people even know about it. A small fraction of the park is motorable and most of the accessibility through the park is through steep and narrow paths like in the above photograph. It can get rather eerie in there because the canopy blocks away most of the light and it is perpetually dark. And with the wind, the bamboos squeak and whistle adding sound effects to an already mysterious looking place. We were on the constant look-out for wildlife -- after all that was the aim of the trip and we did see some of them and it's amazing how well they blend into the forest. However, the dream of seeing a clouded leopard or a bear or even a tiger was not to happen, but I can only imagine how exciting it would have been to see one of those in this wonderful setting.

One of the numerous streams along the road inside the Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary in Arunachal Pradesh. This was taken at around noon on a beautiful misty day.