Tag: himachal

Nature

Flycatchers and their fidget…

Flycatchers - Grey-headed canary-flycatcher

Flycatchers often seem bound by invisible tethers… zeroing in on a branch and launching rapid sallies from there again and again to pluck food out of the air, all in a theatrical lasting a few minutes at the most… always fidgety, their restive disposition making the onlooker feel the same after a while… they are …

Nature

Grey bushchat and a tricky bokeh…

Grey Bushchat (Saxicola ferreus)

Grey bushchat – like most ‘chats’, ‘tis gregarious and grumpy, not intimidated by human presence, but not too happy about it either… it doesn’t really set the world, or the woods, on fire with its dull grey and white plumage… ‘tis the songs rather, and the nifty movements that set one up into following its trail… …

Nature

Blackbird blues…

Grey-winged blackbird

Blackbird singing in the dead of the night… – every time I sight one of these demure thrushes, more silhouettes than full profiles most of the time, that earthy earworm of a tune by the Beatles automatically starts playing in the head, albeit the bird most definitely doesn’t sing in the dead of the night… …

Mountains

Twilight deliverances…

Twilight in mountains

Twilight is by all means a magical time of the day… crepuscular congregations in full swing as the skies grapple with those sudden transient spurts of colour fading into the dusk or the day as soon as they appeared… twilight is when the sun really gives a few glimpses of it’s true artistic potential, for …

Nature

Plumbeous and its riverine plump

Plumbeous redstart

Plumbeous redstarts endear one with their restiveness, nudging and ingesting hapless insects trying to fathom fast flowing waters… a songbird punctuating rivers and streams, it darts around from boulder to boulder tracing parabolas in the air, adding to the din of the river with short, shrill calls and animating the surroundings with a flurry of …

Nature

Dipper and its daredevilry…

Brown dipper (Cinclus pallasii)

The dipper tends to send a few shudders down the onlooker’s well-cloaked disposition before one begins to marvel at its foraging, combing the surface of frigid waters emboldened by gravity before diving into their shallow depths for a morsel… seemingly foolhardy but in reality, one of those evolutionary ingenuities… I knew that the brown dipper …

Nature

Treecreeper and its tantalizing prance

Bar-tailed Treecreeper

The treecreeper is a rather comforting bird to look at… ensconced in its arboreal domain, enquiring for food among nooks and crannies, subsisting industriously… twixt humility and hubris, it prefers the former, choosing a benign camouflage over loud contrast… skittering up trees with hastiness akin to a rodent, leading some hapless insects to the end …

Mountains

Pangi – notes from a hidden hinterland

Pangi valley, Himachal Pradesh

…When it rains, it pours… …Raindrops keep falling on my head… …Rain on your parade… …Why does it always rain on me… There we were, all primed up for Panpatia Col in the third week of September, supposedly having given the monsoons a wide berth… but then came a spell of rain that battered most …

Mountains

on long walks in mountains…

walks in Indian Himalaya

there are walks in the mountains while hiking that one underestimates, naïve enough not to pay heed to the illusions of a simple way up wild gorges… the day elongates proportionally with the trail, disaggregated into phases that seem like days unto themselves, each phase anchored to its own particular memory… there’s a brief period …