Hey cousin ! .... two Storks.... two Continents...

They cannot be mixed up with each other for sure - after all they got separated a million years back but still the similarities are unmistakable. One from Indian Subcontinent and one from Africa. Both more beautiful than the other. The sitting posture, the beak, the basic plumage is all the same you will agree. Infact as we watched them, the behaviour too was absolutely the same. Only thing I missed was that I did not see the Yellow-billed Stork feeding.  That one behaviour would have convinced me more about their being related - I have seen our painted stork feeding so very many times and the feeding is very peculiar. The bird wades in shallow water (knee deep) and opens the bill partially - and sweeps it left and right - any fish, frog etc that touches the beak is quickly snapped up and swallowed. The African cousin at 108cm pictured first is slightly bigger than the Indian Cousin standing at average of 100 cm.

Yellow-billed Stork

Okay now - if you find the bird looking so similar - the birds will be be related in at one level or another. In this case the Family (Ciconiidae) and Genus (Mycteria) are the same. Both are beautiful birds at that and were a great treat to see. Of-course the Painted Stork is one bird that I run into off and on in India.

Painted Stork (though the neck may seem devoid of feathers in this picture - it is just that they are wet and struck together)

I have not inserted the sounds as storks are very poor at making sounds as adults. Most of the times it is the clattering produced by striking the beaks together. 

One unfortunate fact is that the Painted Storks are nearly decimated in wild in Thailand, small populations survive in Cambodia and are under serious threat in Pakistan where the Painted Stork's nests are targeted and chicks harvested for Pet Trade. This puts the conservation status of Painted Storks as Near Threatened.

The Yellow-billed stork populations are known to be decreasing but not rapidly so are still listed as Least Concern.

A Crow of a Time - Uganda

What is with these crows? Photographing crows have been my achillies heel, okay - I might have another dozens of them here and there but this is one of them. You look towards them - they are ready to fly - you pick up the camera - they are already up and away. You really think one can get away with pointing something towards them - forget it - they are way too smart. Point something towards them - they will not only fly away but also keep you in the periphery of their vision and GOD forbid that you look towards them again - this is no way to photograph them. I learnt this the hard way - actually very very hard way. 

Then there is this one more small little problem - they are usually black and I do not know about others but my camera and me included break into a sweat playing with the settings. As if that was not enough the Crows in Uganda turned out to be Black and White - whatever you thought would work just went out of the window - either you will over expose White or you will under-expose black. No way you will land a perfect shot - till the time you are as lucky as me.

Pied Crow

Hide, take a zoom lens, crop the picture and show the world how easy it is to picture crowns 😀

Let me come down to my experience in Uganda - we had two Crows and one Raven in the range we visited. The Piapiac - the unusual crow of East Africa, the Pied Crow and the White-naped Raven. I would discuss the Piapiac in a moment. First the Pied Crow - the crow that looked and behaved like a crown. It was bigger than the common house crow that we so often seen in India. It used to cautiously hop around keeping a lookout towards the humans and perhaps everything else. They sounded like a crow. These were the intelligent types - one look and off they go. They were every where but extremely cautious. Inspite of seeing them everywhere they hardly afforded me photo opportunity. When I did photograph them on two occasions - once they were actually preoccupied and concentrating on the task at their hands and on the second occasion I hid behind a tree and took snapshots of a crow sitting far far away. 

Piapiac - the crow with long tail

The immature Piapiac have red bills that become black as the birds mature.

Piapiac on back of an elephant in Murchison

Now as to why I call Piapiac an unusual crow was that their look and behaviour was not what I have seen of crows in my experience. The tails were long and pointed. The sounds they made was not the croaking sound of a crow but more like a shriek of a parrot, shrike or something. The sounds of the pied crow and the piapiac are in the end of this article for you to compare. Their behaviour too was unlike the crows normally seen. They were all over the place jumping over cows, elephants, giraffes and other animals - that kind of thing is better expected out of oxpeckers and cattle egrets. That is why perhaps they were perhaps as approachable as cattle egrets - not bothered about anything in the world other than what they were doing.

Unfortunately for us - we did not sight any Raven - though there were people in the group who claimed to have seen one. The range of raven was in the vicinity of Entebbe and Kampala. So perhaps some other time...

A Vulture gone Nuts: Palm-nut Vulture

I was preparing for the trip to Uganda and came across this bird in my book - Palm-nut Vulture. I thought it is an odd name. Odd ? Come off it - of course it was Very Very Odd... Its a fairly small bird, infact the smallest of the Vultures in East Africa. Don't get fooled by that - this small bird is still 60cm (24 inches).

It is a boldly marked black and white raptor with large black patches with white tipped black tail. It also has a funny hunched position while sitting and has a long and large bill with bare pink skin around the eyes.

All said and done - the bird was majestic...

Coming back to the story of the bird's name - Palm-nut Vulture. The range of the bird is fairly large and coincides with the Palm Oil Plantation and the range. Surprisingly - inspite of being a vulture - 65% of its diet consists of fruits of Oil and raffia palms as well as grains of other plants. In addition to this if will take fish, invertebrates, amphibians as well as small mammals, birds and reptiles. It behaves like a vulture feeding on small carcasses too.

This is a chance shot of the bird passing overhead. Notice the fish in it's claws

A bird near lake Victoria as we drove from Entebbe

Sam bird as above...

This birds is not persecuted, but gets affected by habitat loss - particularly in West Africa due to expansion of oil palm plantation that gives it limited opportunities to nest and as a result of harvesting. Infact the major threat now that remains with the most of the birds is the rapidly changing environment in the hands of humans who don't care a damn - considering it a birth right to profit out of whatever means possible.

All the same coming back to the bird - it was a great sighting - that happened on majority of our stay days in Uganda and though photographing of this bird was not very easy as the perch points were generally very high up in the trees.

Of beautiful Wattles and Wattle-eyes: Brown-throated Wattle-eye (Uganda)

A small little bird that impressed everyone there in Uganda was a Wattle-eye. Though there are five species of the birds in East Africa - we could see only one. My book on birds of East Africa describes the birds as medium sized, fly-catcher like and several of them named after the females plumages and not males. 

The birds we saw were the Brown-throated Wattle-eye, one of the common birds there. We saw a pair but the male was more fidgety and did not give too good an opportunity to photograph but the female was more patient and gave a few but good opportunity to observe and shoot. The bird like described in the book was around the average 13 cm. This is also one of the biggish birds with others being somewhat smaller than this.The bird has been listed as common and we saw the birds in the fringe area of Mpanga forestry reserve.

The female and the Dark Chestnut Brown neck that gives the bird its name

Brown-throated Wattle-eye (Female)

I am including this picture as it gives a great view of the potruding wattles over the eyes.

The birds were great sport in the sense that they sang out to each other and the singing birds were as great to hear as they were to see. I am embedding the sound from Xeno-canto for your listening pleasure.

Two birds... one click: African Jacana and Grey-headed Gull

Well I would love to say - it is not everyday that you get two lifers with errr... one click. There is a big problem when you go out of the way for birding, like me visiting Uganda and you find birds that are common, common they may be but you throw common sense out of the window and do not trust the previous knowledge worth a dime. Come on - you want me to spell it out to you? well they are birds - they decide whether you have the pleasure of their company and not the other way round.

African Jacana was supposed to be common and it did show itself plenty of times while on our hunt of Shoebill. But then during those times there are very special times when the lighting is great, background and foreground is a sort of perfect and Wham ! other birds decide to land on the same very spot. Now you are in a fix, perfect foreground, perfect background and a confused soul behind the lens. Anyway - I did what I thought was the best at that moment - I kept the camera down - to the surprise of my birding guide. I can still imagine him cursing beneath his breath while he was trying to whisper - Grey-headed Gull.... the boatman had stopped rowing the boat trying to give me a perfect moment and I too realised that the boat was drifting and the moment would soon be lost. I had tried to soak in the environment a bit too long I suppose. The modern cameras give this opportunity a bit better than their predecessors I believe. I pressed the shutter and did not raise the finger till my 200 shot buffer gave up. The rest you can decide after seeing the picked few pictures...

Lilly in foreground, African Jacana the bird I was photographing and the gulls in the background...

A portrait of African Jacana

There are two Jacanas found in Uganda the African Jacana, one pictured above and Lesser Jacana. Though the range overlaps I was fortunate to see only one of the two. The frontal shield of the birds I saw were striking blue.

...and the gull asked me - we flew in all for nothing?

Neat birds was my first expression. The Grey-headed Gulls did not leave their names to any imagination. Other that the neat grey heads - the eyes were beautiful with pale yellow eyes surrounded by pink red ring. saw these birds in flight as well as resting as they landed on the island of sort occupied by a lone Jacana.

...keep posing I said 

...face slightly to the left - Ah ! that's my girl...

...the moments drifting away...

Snowy-headed Robin-Chat: Uganda

Another bird that I found in Uganda that was beautiful, a 'chance see' as I really did not expect to see it. The bird was the Snowy-headed Robin-Chat also called Snowy-crowned Robin-Chat. Well people little realise that bird watching is also of many a variety. I will talk about my trip to Uganda - that was specifically for birdwatching with a large group of people - it was birdwatching for sure but the "Pokemon Go" variety. You are let off in a Botanical gardens and given time - 3 hours and said - Go ! you go running around and seeing all the birds that you can see. Sometimes you go together, other times either you huddle in small teams at other times you go alone. This kind of birding is not the peaceful kind where in you locate a spot, sit down, let the birds be naturalised to your presence and then wait for them to hop around you if you are lucky. Well both have their merits but then there are birds that you do not expect to see while in your "Pokemon Go" hunt variety. The birds you do not expect are the extremely shy ones, the ones for whom you have to time and effort on your hands. All that is well but here is where the luck factor can call it a draw.

Article of this bird on wiki is a stub and the handbook says this about the bird - 'not uncommon but shy'. See why it was perfectly placed this bird in my 'may not see' category. 

On the first day of visit to Uganda after having a lunch we still had time and the majority decided to go to Entebbe Botanical forests before checking in the rooms. So with luggage still in the vehicle we got down at the gardens, the guide paid up the fees and we were running around like kids chasing birds (Average age of our group may be near the 55s or 60s). I decided that it was best that I set course along a path and I was leading by about an hundred odd yards when I came across a stream crossing the path. I saw some common bulbuls taking bath and got down on my knees to photograph them. It might have taken 10 min or so of my waiting, kneeling still like that punishment in class in the golden 80s era. And bingo this Robin-chat hops in for a quick bath. 

If I was surprised - then let me assure you the bird seemed as surprised to find me there. It did a few hops and it was gone. With no time to adjust the settings, towards the dark undergrowth of the tropical forest, I let go a lot of shots. Though they were too dark - it was only after reaching India and post processing I could salvage the pictures.

My first and only encounter with this bird: Snowy-headed Robin-Chat

It was looking at me as if to say - Holy Sh*t - who's there ? and off it was...

Gonoleks of Uganda...

If I was to tell one of the most beautiful bird that I saw in Uganda - well it will be pretty difficult to answer, difficult because so many birds there were beautiful in every sense - however ummm... there is one bird that will pop up in the mind. The bird that was beautiful - with the bird present everywhere we went - but always flirting with our cameras. The call was very clear and the bird could be clearly identified - but to see the bird was more of a luck than it flirting in and out of trees and bushes. 

The bird was 'Gonolek' - a small 20 odd cm bird with a striking black and scarlet body with creamy-white eyes. Infact there are are two Gonlek's residing in East-Africa and we (specifically me) were lucky to see both of them. One is the Black-headed Gonolek, the bird found in cities, country sides, parks and everywhere else, the other was the Papyrus Gonolek - similar to the Black-headed other than the crown of the bird that was golden-yellow. This bird is also listed as 'Locally common' but more difficult to observe in the dense papyrus swamps.

The papyrus gonolek was sighted in during the hunt for shoebill in the Mbamba swamps. Infact that is the only place we saw it - though I might have heard the call at one more place during the boat ride to the birthplace of mighty Nile.

Black-headed Gonolek - the first one sighted outside out guest house in Entebbe 

Same bird

Once again in Entebbe - different bird, on the hindsight I do not have a single picture of a female...

Same bird

Okay I am not going to get sick of posting this bird a hundred times here...

Same bird...

During a walk...

Last day this bird was sighted in Entebbe Botanical Gardens - just before we set course for the airport on our way back home

This is the second bird - the Papyrus Gonolek. One sighting and this bird appeared for a few seconds - jumping around in reeds hardly coming out in clear 

Okay this is the second picture that the bird was out.. and this was the only instance...

An interesting fact about the bird was that the bird calls were a duet in a sense where in the male makes a bell like sound and the female responds with a harsh grating sound.



Though you might not notice - it is a duet by the first sweet sound of male and then almost overlapping harsh sound of female. The above call is of Black-headed Gonolek.


Again, pasted above is a duet call of male and female of Papyrus Gonolek. Notice the almost immediate response of the female.

Birding across continents: Yellow Wattles and Lapwings...

I have been lucky - lucky in the sense that in the last one year I have made birding trips to two other continents - Australia in Oct last year and Africa, Jul this year. I was lucky to see similar species across the three continents - that is Asia (Indian Subcontinent to be precise), Africa (East Africa) and Australia. The observations on the similar species that I have observed in these three places is wonderful. I am no scientist - and do not proclaim myself to be an ornithologist - but to a keen birdwatcher like me - to discover facts like this - simply by observation is a great and interesting thing to observe and study.

I intend discuss all such birds. My birding trips have been - the tourist variety - not the kind that I might have preferred - staying for days and observing - but then something is better than nothing ? Okay the first similar birds that I saw across were the Lapwings, I am talking about Lapwings with Yellow Wattles. So in India we have our Yellow-wattled Lapwing, a bird not very common but fairly common (don't get me wrong please - what I mean is less common than very common), in Australian East Coast I saw Masked Lapwing, again a fairly common bird and in Uganda I saw Wattled Plover or also called Wattled Lapwing. The Wattled Lapwing in Uganda was seen by me only in Murchison while on a safari - but where I did see them - they seemed common enough.

The birds have been presented here with my home bird first followed by Australian and then African, purely in the sequence I have seen them in my life.

YELLOW-WATTLED LAPWING: INDIA

Picture of Yellow-wattled Lapwing in flight (India)

Yellow-wattled Lapwing (India)

The cute baby: Yellow-wattled Lapwing Chick (India)

MASKED LAPWING: AUSTRALIA

I virtually saw this bird along the entire East Coast. There are two subspecies This picture is of Race novaehollandiae. Just don't ask me how to spell it.

This picture is of the Race miles. The basic difference visually is the Wattle, The black on the crown, nape and going down the side of the neck.

AFRICAN WATTLED LAPWING: AFRICA (UGANDA)

The bird with the smallest yellow wattles. My sightings were in the Murchison fall area - but seemed fairly common there.

Okay there is blur - but I thought I will share this - have only limited pictures to compare.

Now that we have seen the three birds that I saw over these three continents - let me try and compare them a little more.

Bird	Family	Size (cm)	Remarks
Yellow-wattled Lapwing	Charadriidae	26-28	The birds behaved exactly as the other. The behaviour may have been in part due to belonging to the same family. The african birds I did not hear them - seemed quite but my exposure was for just 2 days, the Indian Yellow-wattled calls only when disturbed and the Australian was nearer to our Red-wattled Lapwing - same irritating calls over and over again.
Masked Lapwing	Charadriidae	35-39
African Wattled Lapwing	Charadriidae	34

However listening to the sounds they made was absolutely similar with small variations here and there. If you do listen to either of them - you cannot go wrong guessing that you are listening to a lapwing. None of the birds discussed are migrants so stands to logic that coming from the same family they got split as the land masses moved away from each other and over period they developed same and different - all at the same time. I will not speculate into the science of all this but am satisfied to be a witness to these small things and classify under the small miracles of Life...

I hope you have liked going through the blog. The references to the blog has been done by Wiki, xeno-canto and referencing the books I had bought for the birding at these three places. They are the best I got to pick from a lot of books on the subject floating around. I am leaving a link to all the books I have referred - before and after the tours...

Hamerkop, an interesting bird - Uganda...

It may be a little difficult to believe but it is a fact that I have been debating hard for last three full days as to what bird figures out in my next blog post. For a change I have a great database to play with. We saw a total of 167 birds in the eight odd days of birdwatching in Uganda. Out of that 60 or 70 of them were kind enough to pose - with patience I mean - to give me a great picture. In other words - they gave me quality time ;-).

Then this bird - the Hamerkop - an odd bird bird by looks for us the Indians made the grade. It made the grade with three points, it was intriguing, it was found commonly and most importantly molecular studies have shown it as the closest relative to the Shoebill, the bird that I had posted in my last blogpost.

Notice the Hammer ??

By reading this name - some may point out - oh the bloody bird has been spelled wrongly - well this bird actually is know by half a dozen names - like Hammerkop, Hammerkopf, Hammerhead, Hammerhead Stork, Umber bird, Tufted Umber or Anvilhead etc. However since my book on Birds of East Africa spelled it Hamerkop - I am sticking by it. 

It is a medium sized wader bird and abundant in Uganda (will stick to it but wiki says it is abundant in Africa). We saw it almost every where we went and had a waterbody. This bird has a lot of interesting behaviour that are intriguing at the least. Like I believe that upto 10 birds join in for 'ceremonies' in which they run circles around each other calling loudly and raising crests and fluttering their wings. The strangest behaviour is yet to come - this bird is a compulsive nest builder and builds four to five nests every year - whether breeding or not. The nest is huge, sometimes over 1.5 m across. it compromises of upto 10,000 sticks and can support a man's weight. The outside is decorated with bright coloured objects. The base of the nest is made by a platform of sticks held together with mud - then walls are made followed by a domed roof. The entrance is mud plastered and leads through a tunnel upto 60 cm long to a nesting chamber large enough to accommodate the parents and the young. There are so many animals and birds that use the hamerkop nests - snakes, genets, weavers, owls among others. Owls may usually force the birds out. The hamerkops will give away the nests - and usually reoccupy after the owl has left after breeding. During our visits - in the hindsight I have seen two such nests, unfortunately did not photograph them. 

This may be - what was described as 'Running in circles' ceremony...

Another very interesting ceremony that I was in which the birds do 'False Mounting'. I witnessed this three times and the entire group was present during one of this event - definitely.  During this one bird stands on top of the other and appears to mount it, but they may not be mates and neither will they copulate. The fun part was that the bird below was not perturbed at all during all the three times I saw them doing this. I was wondering this behaviour - and only read about it after I came back and studying about the birds in greater detail. 

The false mounting first noticed by me at Entebbe Botanical Gardens

The false mounting ceremony noticed and documented second time during my visit at Mobamba Swamps

Well that is that till the next bird pops along to be figuring here...
The birding book that I took along to Uganda

A bird with a Million Frowns... Shoebill - Uganda

I have been underground from blogging for past almost two weeks - the reason was not that I was being chased by agency but that I was having a gala time birding in Uganda.

Uganda? of course - a birding destination par excellence. The most sought out bird before I visited that place was the 'Shoebill' - well after I reached there - it was sill the most desired bird - that along with a a few more I suppose. The rumours are that there are only 150 odd birds in wild in Uganda.  And like always - habitat destruction is the biggest threat to this bird. The birds are prehistoric in the looks and the bill looks like a shoe - the old wooden shoe from the yesteryears. Standing tall at 110-140 cm - it is a big bird. This bird is mentioned as Abu Markub, which means - the one with a shoe. The wiki and a lot of other forums describe this bird as one of the five most desirable birds in Africa.

During our visit to Uganda we had two occasions where we could have found the bird - one - the visit to the Mbamba Swamps - two - the Murchison falls. The eBird statics were describing the chances 50% and that was not good enough after flying for 6,000 odd km from Chandigarh - Mumbai - Nairobi to Uganda. But then - as with birdwatching - 100% is just not done normally. All the same - there was nothing to do really other than pray perhaps. Pray we all did and on second day of our visit we were on our way to Mbamba swamps. We were a group of 20 birdwatchers and were divided in a group of 3 to 4 each along with a bird guide and were out in the swamps on motorised canoe.

The stare...

The beauty of a different kind...

We were transported to the Prehistoric times - an experience worth the travel across the oceans...

I am sure you would not have got bored staring at these pictures - after all I did not get bored clicking a thousand of these...

We were traversing narrow paths in the swamps created by passing boats - and getting excited by all the birds seen. After all - virtually every bird was a lifer. African Jacana, Yellow-billed Ducks, Long-toed Plovers, Cisticolas and others. But at the back of the mind the hunt for Shoebill was still on. I was on the first canoe among our group - leading the charge. After about half an hour of hunt in the far distance we saw a canoe (not from our group) standing staring at something in the distance - and bingo - there was a solitary shoebill standing majestically in the far distance. What a sight it was. It was like we have gone back in time a million years and standing with a dinosaur in front of us. A million clicks and almost half an hour in company of the bird was not the reason we moved on - it was just that we had to explore another sections of the swamps and who knew we might just catch sight of another one of these. 

As we stood there staring at the majestic sight we were fed a lot of stories in by our guide in hushed tones. That included that it is an opportunistic hunter and will grab a duck or a bird if it ventures nearby, also that the hooked beak can grab fairly large fish out of the water with a snap.

We were lucky and unlucky that day - all at the same time. Lucky because we saw it, unlucky because this was the only sighting. Even Murchison falls was a wash out - guess eBird was right all along.

The boat and the birders...