Hebbal Lake, 060108

January 13, 2008

For the first time, I was able to visit Hebbal Lake, as Garima Bhatia had offered to give interested people a lift to the first Sunday birding session there. So KM’s cousin-from-Qatar, and I went there early in the morning to find that we had "mist" a lot...there was so much of it, in fact, that bird activity began long after we reached there. But a hot cup of tea followed by another helped put a lot of warmth in us, and as the experienced birders reached the place, it was like a who's who of the birding community!

Subbu and co started their waterfowl census and this meant that we did not walk around as the Lalbagh contingent usually do. It was sad to see the Oberois’ signboard charging fees for walking around what has, so far, been a lovely public space, but let’s not get into that here…

The first thing that I decided to snap, the wild Morning Glory….

wild morning glory hebbal 060108

Then some birds. Here's the male NORTHERN SHOVELLER: male northern shoveller 060108 the COMMON COOT (everything I photograph can usually have the adjective "common" prefixed to it. Not for me the rare sightings that the birding community talks about!) common coot hebbal lake 060108 the even more common PURPLE MOORHEN, really, such an iridiscently colourful bird and there's a POND HERON next to it. The Pond Herons were really congregating in large numbers that day. Perhaps it was their biweekly "watch the birders", or "bngbirders" day: purple moorhen hebbal Now for some very lousy photographs of some distant spots; I am including them to a)make me remember that photography-wise I am still very spotty, and b) some interesting birds which I could not get closer to. (More b) than a).) The bird in the centre of the photograph is the BLACK-WINGED STILT: blackwinged stilt and in this picture can be seen the GREEN SANDPIPER: green sandpiper is in the pic, right of the egret and here's the dovecote nesting site of that eminently successful species, Homo sapiens urbanus... construction near hebbal lake Shyamal, who has designed the birding software called BirdSpot , gave me a most illuminating 101 talk on the different types of feeding habits of water birds...the shoveller, the stilt, the merganser, the pelican...

We feasted on the lovely wild baby tomatoes that were growing all over…

wild baby tomatoes Hebbal 060108

Garima dropped us all the way back home and thanks to her, we had a thoroughly enjoyable morning birding!