From Bandipur diary 2010 - 2

You can read the part 1 here

I woke up to a wonderful day in Bushbetta. I opened the door in the morning to hear birds chirping and monkeys squeaking with delight. There is always breeze. Sometimes gentle caressing your cheeks, sometimes strong enough to hug you tight. We could see plenty of tiny birds around, many of them unfamiliar to us. These days urbanization is making the small birds extinct for they are losing their habitat. I began bird watching right away clicking them with my ultrazoom Nikon coolpix P100. As you can see the image quality is not so great, but few of the birds were good enough to pose for me in a nice way.

The red whiskered bulbul

Now I was really losing my patience. Shooting tiny birds without a tripod is really frustrating. There were plenty of robins and other tiny birds which skillfully evaded my camera. We went to have our breakfast at 9.30am. The tables were relatively empty by the time we finished our breakfast. We were surprised to see a lot of winged beauties chirping in the nearby table fearlessly. They had come for the left overs and were not bothered by the shooing of the waiter boys. I rushed to the sight for some quick snaps and the boys had to wait to clean up till I was done.

After breakfast we loitered around the resort for sometime and then decided to go for a drive to the nearby villages.

All I wanted was to see sunflower fields and John drove a few kilometers to find them. I voraciously shot a lot of pictures till he was bored.

They stood majestically facing the sun in unison, an impressive sight.

Several other crops were there including onion. We were stopped many times by boys waving frantically at us to buy onion. Soon we were back to the resort for lunch and a short break. Jungle safari was due by 3.30pm. I resumed bird watching from the balcony and John took a short break.

I will be back with the rest of my stories soon, till then Bye....