We certainly had a wonderful time at the Bird Race, and we certainly never had any expectations; our ranking, after all, would depend on how many birds the other teams saw! Here we are, early in the morning:

Our list had 123 birds, and most of them, I never did photograph. I'm hoping that the others will put up their bird-race photographs up soon! We started at my top favourite birding location, the Bannerghatta Zoo area. We found several WIRE=TAILED SWALLOWS including this juvenile: ,that's a bird on the wire for you! A bird that I enjoyed seeing was the handsome LARGE CUCKOO-SHRIKE: The Zoo area is particularly good, I find, for flycatchers of all kinds. We sighted this ASIAN BROWN FLYCATCHER: It's also a good place to get some varieties of waterbirds, at the crocodile pond near the Herbivore Safari: At the edge of the pond, this GREY WAGTAIL hopped along, busily wagging its tail: a few LITTLE CORMORANTS dried their wings after diving for food: We spent quite a long time watching a pair of PIED KINGFISHERS fishing; I managed to get one at rest: a common bird, the BLACK KITE sat upon a pole, eating early breakfast: the PADDYFIELD PIPIT is always a pretty bird to see! I liked the scenery that included a couple of RED-WATTLED LAPWINGS: Saandip then suggested that we go to the edge of Jigani Lake, quite close to the Zoo area, and off we went, where we saw this lovely LONG-TAILED SHRIKE: We then went to Ramnagara, where our raptor sightings were wonderful, including this scene of a SHAHEEN (PEREGRINE) FALCON high up on the cliffs: Though it was the "wrong" time of day, two LONG-BILLED VULTURES were already on the cliff-face, and two more came sailing in: they then proceeded to spread out their wings, we were unable to understand why: Mani also spotted an EURASIAN EAGLE OWL in one of the cliff cavitis... We spent far longer than we should have, watching these majestic birds...but finally, lunch beckoned, and after a "Thatte Idli" lunch at Bidadi, decided to go back to the small birds, and went on to our closing venue, Valley School...and we were not disappointed. We sighted this BOOTED WARBLER: Having run out of time, we decided to head back to the post-race meeting at the Royal Orchid in Manipal Centre, where Prashanth Badrinath (I call him Birdynath!) and Mike Prince were collecting everyone's logbooks prior to getting to work on them: </lj-cut> I've put up my photos on Facebook here ...we never had any rare-bird sighting, so were hard put to it to designate a Bird of the Day! However, it was worth noticing at that at 5pm at Valley School, we were already birding by moonight! :) Let me close with this beautiful view of the main pond in Valley School: It was a tiring but very satisfying