I may not have had great luck with the tigers in India, but I did have very good luck with owls. On one particular evening, I went out “owling” with one of the camp managers. We were able to photograph four different species, including these Oriental scops owls. I was photographing the owl in front, and just as I was about to release the shutter, the other owl swooped in from behind and the two started mating for a few seconds before they both flew off.
Interesting tiger fact of the day: It’s not just the tiger’s fur that is striped, but the body as well. In other words, if shaved clean, you’d see that the skin is tattooed with the same stripes that occur on the fur. This is another female from Bandhavgarh National Park in Madhya Pradesh in central India.
Growing up in the United States we tend to associate peacocks with zoos, roaming uncaged throughout the premises. It was nice to see them in their natural habitat in the forests of India. They are actually quite common throughout much of India and Sri Lanka. There is another species, the green peacock, which lives in Java and Myanmar, and a third, the Congo peacock which lives in the rain forests of Africa. This one here, the blue, is the species that we see most often in zoos.
These langur monkeys go by several names, including the hanuman langur, black faced langur, common langur or grey langur. They seemed to be all over the place in the two national parks I visited in India. And all the mothers seemed to be with a baby. This pair was photographed in Kanha National Park.
Just back from India today and still sorting through all the photos. All in all a good trip, but not nearly as productive as I had hoped. The tigers just weren’t around, but I did see a few, including this female here. The parks in India are also a much different experience than what I have come to expect in other locations — more on that later. Right now time for some much needed sleep.
This will be my last post for about ten days, as I’m off to India tomorrow in search of tigers. In the meantime, here’s another dik dik — as I mentioned in a previous post, one of the smallest antelope species in all of Africa. This one was walking through our camp one afternoon when we were walking back from lunch. Enjoy, and stay tuned for new shots from India.
This bat-eared fox had particularly large ears. I mean, they all have large ears, but this guy really went above and beyond. They are quite skittish and it was difficult to make a close approach, especially since they hear you coming before you can even see them. This guy, however, held out just long enough so that I could get a few portraits. The ears are full of blood vessels and are also instrumental in keeping the fox cool
Spotted hyenas don’t get much respect from the locals in Kenya. It seemed everyone we met talked about how ugly they are — but most of those people did concede that the babies are kind of cute. I’m a bit amazed at how much they can look like underfed grizzly bears. These two weren’t exactly fresh from the womb (especially the one on the right), but I thought they were quite attractive indeed.
Earlier on this particular day we had spotted an impala carcass hanging from a tree — a sure sign that a leopard was in the area. We couldn’t locate the leopard but knew that eventually she would come back to claim her meal. We returned a couple of hours later and there she was, enjoying a little lunch up in the tree. We checked back in one more time at the end of the day and saw her again. She was still on the kill, but eventually got up and walked down the tree, allowing me to take this silhouette shot.
A blessing and a curse, the elephant tusk is actually an elongated incisor tooth. Elephants use their tusks for many things, including fending off predators or other elephants, foraging for food, stripping bark from trees and for moving larger objects out of the way. Unfortunately, humans have many uses for tusks too, which has led to wide scale poaching over the years and the near eradication of the species before stricter laws were enforced. Elephants have been so decimated by poaching, in fact, that the gene that produces larger tusks has almost been bred out of the species. As a result, today’s elephants have smaller tusks than they did a hundred years ago.