Articles featuring India and her wildlife
This unique itinerary explores the Bhabar and Terai jungles of Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh; regions that boast remarkable biodiversity. The Bhabar supports species adapted to drier conditions, such as leopards, wild boars, and various reptiles. The Terai, with its lush vegetation and wetlands, provides a sanctuary for an array of wildlife, including the Bengal tiger, Indian rhinoceros, and Asian elephants.[…]
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“What’s in your camera bag?” is a question I am frequently asked and one that always gets the same response – “It depends where I’m going.”
Just ‘cos you’ve got lots of lenses doesn’t mean you have to take them all.
If at all possible, try to take a combination that means you won’t need to constantly be changing lenses. Dust is a massive problem in Africa and every time you change lenses you are opening up both camera and lens to a potential dust invasion.
Community Owned Community Operated Nature (COCOON Conservancy) Conservancies are critical rewilding initiatives undertaken outside India’s Protective Area Network. Based on the underlying premise that communities living closest to our most biodiverse wonderlands deserve to be the primary beneficiaries and custodians of our biodiversity this initiative expands the size and improves the quality of habitat available to wildlife by encouraging local communities to convert their own marginal and failed farms back to their natural wild state.
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Amazingly, the weather held for the whole day and our afternoon drive also enjoyed decent weather. The sky was blue and the air was wonderfully clear.
I would have loved to go back and sit near the Broadbill nests but I did not have the only vote and my travelling companions wanted to get out of the jungle onto the plains where they could see some of the larger mammals.
Kaziranga is a lovely park to visit with plenty of water bodies and lots of open plains making it easy to see the wildlife.
In fact, I saw more mammals on my first drive in Kaziranga than I’d seen in a week at Tadoba, and a large percentage of them were One-horned Rhinos. The park has almost 2,700 rhinos, almost twice as many rhinos as Swamp Deer (1,800) Elephants were plentiful too, as were the Water Buffalo.
With tea estates on both sides of the road it was immediately clear that we were in tea country.
For our stay we had chosen a property surrounded by tea plantations called Banyan Grove. In fact Banyan Grove was formerly the residence of the Deputy Plantation Manager for the Gatoonga Tea Estate.
Banyan Grove is one of a small collection of properties owned/operated by Heritage Northeast ( https://www.heritagetourismindia.com/ ). It is a wonderful old building surrounded by lawns, although the original Banyan tree that gave it its name has long since died.
The Sundarbans is an area that has long appealed to me and finally I was getting the chance to visit. Touted as the National Park with the highest number of tigers in India it is also listed among India’ top birding locations, so I had high hopes. The drive from Kolkata to Godkhali where we’d be boarding a boat to[…]
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I’m not a big fan of cities, but as almost every visit to India requires spending at least 1 night in the city where the international flight arrives. Usually time in cities is kept to an absolute minimum and we head straight out in search of wildlife but, as this was my first visit to Kolkata, I thought it might be fun to stay a couple of days and have a look around.
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Probably one of the most frequent questions we get asked by clients is “What lenses should I take on safari?”
This question is not limited to first timers either; because the equipment you need to take depends very much on where you are going and what the conditions will be like. Photographing rhinos on the plains of Kaziranga NP requires a different approach to photographing sloth bears in the forest at dusk, and photographing birds is very different to photographing elephants.
So how do you make the right selection?
I’ve always considered photographing birds to be a fairly leisurely pursuit. Certainly, for me anyway, it usually involves strolling about the countryside armed with a camera to see what little beauties I can capture.I’m not a ‘twitcher’, not even a proper ‘birder’ really, just a photographer who finds birds a fascinating and challenging subject.Over the past few years, however, my[…]
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