Thattekad Birding Rocks with Gireesh Thattekad Indian Pitta Place: Thattekad, Kerala, India. Date: 20th Nov. 2014 The Indian pitta is a medium-sized 20cms length passerine bird. It breeds mainly in the sub-Himalayas and winters in southern India and Sri Lanka. These birds are found in thick undergrowth and are often more easily detected by their calls, even then it is not often seen, although one hear the calls. How we sighted this bird in the pitched darkness on the first day of my Thattekad birding is an amazing story. We were returning back from our evening trip which yielded not much interesting sightings in the forest, as we entered near the Homestay, the owner Mr. Gireesh who was my guide for entire birding tour of Thattekad. He stopped the car and said we will get down and see if we can get some interesting sightings in the dark. It was dusk time, I said to my mind “what we can see in this darkness and if at all how am I able to photograph if there is any sighting”. I kept just following the footsteps of Gireesh. We entered a thickly wooded plantation in a private property there must be around 100 trees medium sized plantations, as soon as we entered, Gireesh told me to wait for some time and he went ahead to look for any bird movement and sound, after about few minutes he called me to move slowly where he was standing under the tree. When I came near him , he just angled up his sight and told me to look up at the thickly wooded branch at a fairly 7 to 8 feet from ground level , a solitary bird was sitting on a branch under the thickets in the darkness of the dusk. It was indeed an Indian Pitta, skulking and retiring for the nightly roost. Gireesh quickly beamed the torchlight knowing clearly that this bird is attracted by bright & strong light in the night & will not be disturbed, meanwhile I arranged my Tripod mounted camera Lens to focus on the bird. This Image is taken in an extremely adverse light conditions but at the end it was an awesome experience of bird sighting with some top class birding guidance by Mr.Gireesh. It was my first sighting of this beautiful nine coloured bird and what an unbelievable experience it was. More to say about this bird it is colloquially called “PITTA” in Telugu which means Tiny and also a Six-O-Clock bird as it has a habit of calling once or twice, often with neighbouring individuals joining in, at dawn or dusk with a distinctive loud two-note whistle wheeet-tieu or wieet-pyou or sometimes, a triple note hh-wit-wiyu. Exposure Programme: Equipment : 5D MarkII + Canon 100-400 Tele Lens Shutter Priority. Aperture: f / 5.6 ISO : 2500 Shutter Speed: 1/125 Ev.: - + 0.67 Focal Length: 400mm W.B: Shade Metering: SPOT Mode: Landscape Flash: No (But external torch source) Tripod Mount Image and Text description Copyright by ThirdEye Reflections. Nature and WildLife Photography. By. Shekhar Bopardikar.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 08:46:46 +0000