Musings in the wild
Surprised by nature – describes the tale of two creatures unexpectedly captured on lens while the author was on the trail of another.
The story of the Bee-eater
The image was taken around famous Anna Sagar Lake near Hyderabad. The lake is famous for migratory birds during winter season. One fine winter morning, I was roaming around the almost dried up lake. There were many geese sitting in the lake but they were far away to enable a good photo capture. Hence I decided to just wait there for the perfect shot. While waiting, I observed this little bee-eater trying to catch bees and returning to the same branch again and again. I saw it doing acrobatics and marveled at its beauty the moment it spread its wings before it took off to catch bees, and decided to capture and share the moment of this beautiful bird.
The bee-eaters, a group of near-passerine birds in the family Meropidae, are characterized by richly colored plumage, slender bodies, and usually elongated central tail feathers, with long down-turned bills and medium to long wings. The male and female usually have similar plumages. They are gregarious creatures and form colonies, nesting in burrows in sandy banks, often at the side of a river or in flat ground. While species are adversely affected by human activity or habitat loss, they are evaluated as “least concern” in the IUCN Red list.
Spotting a Spotted deer
This image was taken in Ranthambore National Park. As we started our morning safari in search of the striped feline, we could see a lot of spotted deer in the jungle. Our guide pointed me towards a particular spotted deer and said “he is going to stand to get to the leaves”! The deer curled his neck back and so did I, to lower my neck closer to the viewfinder, and managed to get the shot. That day we didn’t see any tiger but seeing this image reminds me there is beauty everywhere in the jungle.
The spotted deer or chital(Axis axis) is native to the Indian subcontinent, and is listed as being of “least concern” in the IUCN Red list. Sole member of the genus Axis, they are classified under the Cervidae family. The species is sexually dimorphic; males are larger than females, with antlers present on males only.
