It had been nearly three months since my last photo trip to Kabini (read more about it
here) and the itch was becoming too much. I decided to go to Bandipur this time around, since I hadn't been there before. As usual, the weekends were booked solid at JLR so I had to plan a trip on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. To get leave on these days of the week, I had to promise an arm and a leg at the office. It is a myth that those who run their own company can take leave whenever they want. I have always found it very difficult to take leave and have to weigh a hundred things before doing so. I have never found my employees thinking the same way, they happily apply whenever they want regardless of how it will affect work. Sorry for the rant.
Anyway, come Sunday we (I and my nephew who had just finished his XI std exams) drove off to Bandipur. The road from Mysore to Nanjangud is absolutely terrible, as they are widening the road into a four lane expressway. As of now, only one side is open and as usual, it keeps alternating between the left and right side. At these turning points, there is always a jam with no one willing to give way to vehicles from the opposite side. All said and done, it took a cool one hour to cover the 22 kms distance. The road from Nanjangud to Bandipur via Gundlupet is in reasonably good condition, with some occasional bad patches. We checked in to JLR by around 11:30 and after a good lunch, were ready for our first of our four safaris. Here are the photos from these sojourns into the reserve.
All photos taken with my Nikon D7200 and the excellent Tamron 150-600 lens.
A mongoose looks askance at our presence and refuses to budge from the road:
A lone peacock perched high on a branch. We were on the old dam road and the dried up tree was growing on the sides of the slope, so we were positioned slightly above the bird. I wonder how the bird flew up so high since peacocks are not known to be very strong fliers. In any case it made for a visual spectacle, with the vehicle tracks way down in the background. It is now one of my favourite images:
A barking deer, a very shy animal:
A morose looking langur gazes back at me:
Here is a hoopoe:
A rare sighting in Bandipur, a vulture:
Black naped hare, up on a slight rise away from the track:
An Indian Dhole (wild dog) crosses the track in front of us:
A jungle fowl flew up onto a tree and started giving alarm calls when it saw the Dhole:
A young langur mother with her precious (and super cute) baby langur. She's probably a first time mom, which explains the possesive posture:
Our national bird poses again:
And then we come across the ghost in the shadows. The scrub in the foreground was so distracting that the camera sensor was continually focusing only on that. I had to switch to manual focus to get this one. Unforturnately, it was very late in the evening around 6:30 pm and the light was quickly fading. Moreover, it was also time for us to leave the park, but the driver kindly consented to wait for a few more minutes for this sighting:
And then, this. There were two of them and they were mating! We watched spellbound for a few minutes and then they just melted into the background. They did come out a little later but by then it was too dark to take photos.
This one is purely due to the power of RAW processing to get a barely usable image from what almost looked totally dark in camera. The time difference between the previous photo and this one is just four minutes, but that's how quickly it gets dark out there:
We came across a group of wild pigs, this one is just a kid:
An elephant has become all patchy due to its rolling around in the few feet of water in the mostly dried up pond:
A spotted owl stares at me trying to fit both it and the other bird into the frame at the same time:
Thus ended another short break. I am already looking forward to the next one, not yet decided where I want to go. I hope you enjoyed these photos as much as I enjoyed taking them. Until next time then...bye and drive safe.