http://mamtanaidu.livejournal.com/17425.html

It was really tough, after getting back home at 1.45pm after our monthly QuizFamilies meet, to wake up again at 5am, to go to Turahalli; but Chandan had been talking about his trekking trips for so long that I was determined to go on one with him!

Chandan was a little worried about whether KM and I would be able to make it up the slope…but he need not have worried, as the slope was a very, very gentle one, and in any case, we were ambling up and down, as we kept looking for birds!

For me, any trip into the forest/wild areas has both the bird and the non-bird components; the two together make up the whole experience, so if one is disappointing, the other generally makes up! The trip to Turahalli was, primarily, to enjoy the beauty of the landscape, but the birds didn’t let us down (though the bird photography part was pathetic!) Let me discuss the bird component first:

This started off on a really awesome note. We had hardly stepped out of the car and on to the slope of the path that led to the Munishwara temple when we sighted the Eurasian Eagle Owl, sitting quite a way from us in the early morning light. Of course, there was no opportunity to take anywhere near a decent shot, but since, for me, the documentation is the most important part of bird photography, I have no problems in including two of my terrible shots. One is practically a silhouette that only a committed bird-watcher could recognize as the EURASIAN EAGLE OWL (click on the words for a much better picture!):

My allergy to initials also dates back to the years (15 of them!) that KM spent working for a south Indian automotive ancillary company. There, just after he joined as Marketing Manager, I called up one day and asked for “Mr Mohan”. “Oh! you mean, Yum Yum!” replied the telephone operator, as if my spouse was some kind of candy bar.

I find it very difficult to deal with initials. Those letters that, to everyone else, seem to denote something meaningful, but to me, remain just that….having just seen pictures on INW (India Nature Watch) of the CSE (Crested Serpent Eagle) and posted from LRK (goodness knows what or where that is)… (update, that’s the Little Rann of Kutch, in Gujarat, apparently!) I feel that initials are just things invented so that the user can appear more knowledgeable and jargon-enabled than the non-initials person. Even when I can work out part of it, I can’t work out the whole. I used to keep reading aout SGNP and realized that the NP was probably National Park, but it took me a long while to work out that SG was Sanjay Gandhi. (FG and IG had RG and SG, you know, and RG married SG and they had PG and RG,who are trying their hand at extending the dynasty . SG married MG but IG threw her out after SG died, and VG is not in the polictical picture yet.)

I wanted to post this on Metblogs, but the page I get doesn’t have a link that will let me post (Metblogs was re-designed recently and I guess they still have glitches!)