I’ve finished processing my photos from a short trip to India last month. Here is a gallery of some of my favorite shots. It was a whirlwind trip through the southern state of Tamil Nadu, visiting Mudumalai National Park, Ooty, Coimbatore, Azhagappapuram, Nagercoil and Kanyakumari. These photos were shot over the course of four busy days. Click each image to see the next, or use your keyboard arrows to navigate.
On my trip to southern India last month, I saw quite a few chital, the spotted deer that live throughout the country’s forests. Sometimes appearing solitary, sometimes in herds of 10 or more, they were distributed in a variety of environments from the thick forest of Mudumalai National Park to more open scrub land.
Males are larger than females and can have antlers. These antlers are three pronged and can grow up to one meter long, giving the larger males a majestic appearance.
Like most mammals, the chital are much more active in the early hours of the day. They seemed most relaxed just before sunrise – however that was a much more difficult time to photograph them due to the lack of light. Unfortunately, the closer subjects were extremely skittish, diving into the dense trees as we slowed our vehicle.
Chital are endemic to the Indian subcontinent and can be found as far north as Nepal and Bhutan. A small herd was introduced to the Hawaiian island of Molokai in the 1860s, and can today be found on the island of Lanai.
In some areas of India, Rhesus macaques are all over the place. In certain temples, palaces or other tourist attractions, these guys are more like city pigeons in their ubiquity. However, as someone not usually around wild monkeys, I take every opportunity to pick up my camera and capture some of the amazingly human-like expressions they display.
On a recent trip to southern India, I encountered some of these guys as I got closer to the forests of the Mudumalai Tiger Preserve. For several mothers and their babies, upside down and clinging on definitely seemed to be the transportation mode of choice.
While monkeys can often be very cute as they go about their primate lives, it is important to keep your distance. They can be quite territorial and aggressive, and I certainly wouldn’t want to get into a fight with one!
As we were leaving the city of Ooty, we spotted the guy in the photo above on the side of the road. He had gotten into a neighborly dispute with the fellow below. They were screaming at each other across the road, so I got up close views of each as they bared their fangs and made their intentions known. Sitting in the car and shooting out the window was about as close as I’d want to get!
Not to give you nightmares of macaques, I’ll leave you with a cute shot of a little guy. He was minding his business atop a fence, watching all the goings-on with interest.
While my Indian friends often roll their eyes every time I take out a camera for monkeys, I am always fascinated with watching them go about their day. I’m not sure if I dig their dexterous use of tools or if I’m anthropomorphizing their facial expressions, but I’ll take their photo any day.
There was a chill in the air as I walked down the four flights of stairs to the garden below. Then I remembered that I was close to 8,000 feet of elevation, which also explained my slight shortness of breath. I was in the hill station of Ooty, a mountain top town surrounded by tea plantations. My friend Frans Xavier generously offered to play host to his home state of Tamil Nadu, India for a few days, and this was our first stop on the way from Coimbatore to Mudumalai National Park. We had flown into Coimbatore the day before where we met Frans’ good college friend Frank. This was truly the best way for me to see such a beautiful part of India, with two locals showing me the way!
But of course day one saw me up at dawn, anxious to see which birds I could photograph before we hit the road later that morning. At first I spied one of my regular usual suspects, the house sparrow. Here is a female in the grass, just pulling a fat grub from the earth. I suppose this was the epitome of the “early bird!”
Unfortunately, what was once a common species throughout India, the house sparrow is rapidly disappearing, due most likely to urbanization. It is the typical story we see over and over in this planet’s wild places – loss of habitat.
I slowly wound my way through the garden, which was terraced – carved into the side of a steep hill. My journey was very quiet until I got to the very bottom, at which point the manicured garden met the thick, wild forest. It was alive with bird song, monkey calls, and other unidentified animal sounds that could only be attributed to the beasts of my imagination. At this point, I struck gold (at least from a bird photographer’s perspective). I was eye level with the tops of several bushes, thick with red-whiskered bulbuls.
I had photographed this bird on two occasions in a trip to India last year, but this was by far the most I had seen at once. From my position, it was difficult to move as I was perched on the side of a very steep hill. Any time I tried to move closer to the birds, I ended up underneath them, as I dropped in elevation. So I was pretty much stuck at a fixed distance from the bushes, which fortunately was close enough.
In addition to the bulbul clan, I found a couple of male pied bush chats (a new species for me), flitting up and down the hill. These guys proved to be more skittish than the bulbuls, most likely because they weren’t busy gorging themselves with berries.
After about half an hour, the birds were clearing out and the world around me was stirring. I was happy with my haul – an excellent start to wonderful trip.
