Tarique's Travails » Mundane Musings

Revamped NagpurBirds website launched

tariquesani — Tue, 01 May 2012 05:12:20 +0000

NagpurBirds website was launched in April 2005 as a support website for birders in Nagpur city. It was based on a modified version of Coppermine Picture gallery, at that time Coppermine served the purpose but with passing of time maintaining the script in sync with the main project become a problem and uploads had to [...]

Share and you will be rewarded….

tariquesani — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 04:03:55 +0000

Posted in Mundane Musings

Last year on 17th May I got a short message on Flickr. “Are your photos available for purchase. Would love to purchase one of your photo’s”, I replied back with an equally short “which one”. The reply to which was that sender was an artist and woud like to use my Elephant charge as a [...]

10 years of journaling…

tariquesani — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 03:25:32 +0000

Posted in Mundane Musings

Exactly 10 years ago I wrote my first rather inane journal entry on Live Journal. Seems a very long time ago from one perspective and then not. It is interesting to look at your past 10 years on a single page. The most visually striking thing is perhaps my travails as a photographer from the early days [...]

Primordial….

tariquesani — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:07:54 +0000

Posted in Mundane Musings

There is something primordial about a croc lurking in the shade of trees in a placid river… The binomial name for the Nile Crocodile; Crocodylus niloticus is derived from the Greek kroko (“pebble”), deilos (“worm”, or “man”), referring to its rough skin; and niloticus, meaning “from the Nile River”. The Nile crocodile is called Timsah [...]

Happy birthday dearest :-)

tariquesani — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 08:21:44 +0000

Posted in Mundane Musings

How we missed the Leopard hunt…

tariquesani — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:29:03 +0000

Posted in Mundane Musings

I have some pictures of the Leopard in my portfolio but this one was for whom we waited the longest. It was sleeping when we spotted it first. There was a herd of Impalas grazing very near to the Leopard and our guide said that a hunt is very likely even though at that time [...]

Murder…

tariquesani — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 06:18:49 +0000

Posted in Mundane Musings

Yesterday morning while replenishing the bird feeder in my balcony I witnessed a very unusual behavior by a Bhraminy Starling pair. They pounced on a female House Sparrow and ruthlessly proceeded to kill it by pecking at its neck and abdomen. Once it was dead they flew away with it!!! It took them about 2 mins to [...]

Saddle-billed Stork – a portrait!

tariquesani — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:36:27 +0000

Posted in Mundane Musings

This bird is represented in an Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph that had the phonetic value “ba” Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle-billed_Stork Tweet

Oriental Pratincole

tariquesani — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:58:32 +0000

Posted in Mundane Musings Tumblog

The Oriental Pratincole (Glareola maldivarum), also known as the Grasshopper-Bird or Swallow-Plover is a wader in the pratincole family, Glareolidae. Their most unusual feature of the pratincoles is that although classed as waders they typically hunt their insect prey on the wing like swallows, although they can also feed on the ground. Tweet

The “Houbara” twitch

tariquesani — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 03:20:46 +0000

Posted in Mundane Musings

Twitch: a British term used to mean “the pursuit of a previously-located rare bird.” Wikipedia During our previous visit to Kutch, Gujarat, we had manage to photograph almost all the major bird species, however, the Houbara Bustard (Chlamydotis undulata) had eluded us. Yes, we had managed to get a sighting but I was not happy [...]