Bird of the Day - Painted Storks

PAINTED STORKS AT PULICAT lAKE

Some Birds of Velachery and Pallikkaranai

This is the Pond Heron



This is the Cattle Egret


More Egrets


In the Background - Some Little Grebes, also known as Dabchicks. In the Foreground can be seen a few black polythene garbage bags and one or two birds that we will see closeup a little way down the page.


This bird is something that caused me to hunt around in books to discover it's name.. see the next three pictures as it comes into shape.


It is the Pheasant tailed Jacana, that is what it was!!!



Some sort of Egret?





A lovely picture of the much maligned crow! It is actually vain enough to glance at every puddle - would you believe it?


After shooting the crow, I went back from Pallikaranai Marsh/rubbish heap to The Velachery Rainwater lake. On the way is a little greenery - mostly reeds and marshy water, and what a treat I saw many birds there itself.. in the middle of the day!

Don't know this one's name yet, hunting to find out, but it looked brave on the wires...


This may be a tailor bird, a white throat or a munia.. just give me a few days to find out and post it here.


Another little black one similar to the one on the wires.


This is a Drongo.

Ah I almost thought this was a human scuttling through the reeds foraging for eggs (obviously at midday it couldn't be for any other purpose) until I spotted a feathery flutter of a wing in teh style of a bird... I still don't have a clear picture, but from the books' description of nextinghabits and the colour, I guess this may have been a Purple Moorhen.


Now I was back atthe Velachery Puddle. Here is a nice picture of a man casting his net to catch the fish.

Yo ho ho and Away we Go!

Bird for the Day - Scarlet Minivet

The Scarlet Minivet: Minivets are smallish birds - a little smaller than a sparrow. This one is called the scarlet minivet. To the eye the colours seem to be closer to black and vermillion than scarlet itself... when it flutters to settle down on a twig or rises up, it presents the most enchanting picture. It's not easy to see, as perhaps it is shier than many other birds, but a beautiful spectacle, to be seen amidst a lot of greenery...

Bird for the Day

The Bird for the Day is the Indian Grey Hornbill: See picture below -

It is the most curious bird because looking at it you will wonder if it is a remnant from the age of the dinos that somehow tricked evolution and developed into a bird...

Okay, this statement is factually incorrect - a poetic license to describe the clumsy flappy flight of the Hornbill, which when accompanied by its cry which is a rusty metallic shrieking sound, one cannot prevent the surge of the heart and the soaring of the mind....

Here's the Grey Hornbill folks!

Some birds that can be seen in Chennai now

The Purple Sunbird - This iridescent male bird has this amazing colour during the mating season, other times it is not so colourful and has a plainer yellowish body. The female apparently does not undergo this transformation. You can spot this bird by its long and slightly curved-towards-the-edge beak, and it is usually flitting about in shrubby flowering plants. It is closely related to the Humming Bird.




This is the Pied Crested Cuckoo - Herald of the monsoons. Salim Ali remarked that this bird comes with the monsoon and goes with the monsoon. In that sense it has been called the rainbird, as it travels along the Indian subcontinent along with the monsoon rains. Lovely bird with a typical call, it can be seen in Chennai around November or so. Can be seen resting on the limbs of medium sized trees, almost hidden among the branches.

The Kuil, Koel, Indian Cuckoo - The famous, much loved and omnipresent songbird of India. This is the male of the species. The female is a lighter shade of black, with white patches all over the body and does not have the sweet tone that the male is so famous for. The female is also much more shy and difficult to spot. These birds fly higher and amongthe taller trees and many times into the open. They have many cries and can be identified also by the red eye. it is smaller than the crow and has a longer and thinner tail.