The Grey Tit

Next, I would like to discuss about the Grey Tit (Parus major cinereus). This bird struck me as a rather industrious one, consumed in its own activites and almost overtly oblivious to its surroundings. Perhaps, I always happened to see it when it was in such a mood. Busily foraging and gathering its food from one branch to the other, it seemed to be going about its business with some purposeful intent. It is not that the other birds aren't so, but this bird never seemed to waste even a glance on unnecessary details and events happening around it. Even now when I see this bird, like the one I saw this morning with sleepy eyes, it looks consistently busy, checking and picking things on and between the branches and twigs with its short, straight and pointed beak. It has a neat beak, something like what a small kid would draw in his drawing book for a bird's beak. With this beak the Grey tit normally feeds on insects and their eggs as also on small seeds and nut kernels. The strong short beak helps it to crack hard nuts and seeds. It is around the size of a sparrow, in fact slightly larger, I felt. This bird is coloured in patterns of black and white on grey and it is from this that the bird also derives its common name, the Grey tit.

When I tried to read some on this bird, I realised that this bird has been extensively studied since a long time. There is a more popular variant of this tit, known as the Great tit, which occurs all across Europe. The Great tit shows very good adaptability to the human presence, and also great adaptability in general, and has therefore apparently led to and aided a lot of research.

The grey tits, on the other hand, predominantly occur in Asia. They are believed to forage mostly in pairs through the winters and then summer is their normal breeding season. They communicate in pleasant twitters (yes, I know...it occured to me too).

And now to the photographing part of it. Grey tits, despite their busy continuous bustling, have given me some good frames to capture. They keep frequenting the branches near my house. I have also photographed one (the third one below) at the chowk near the Akurdi-Nigdi Pradhikaran dumping grounds, where I used to wait for my morning office bus. It sure makes for a lovely subject to capture in a photograph.




-Vindy

Scaly breasted munia

Scaly breasted munia was one of the birds that caught my attention when I came to Talegaon. It was monsoon and in the open space that my window overlooked, tall grass and weeds had grown aplenty. Amidst the swinging greens, I saw two brownish specks busily pecking away at things. I wasn't familiar to that kind of birds. I clicked a few snaps and sat down to correlate what I had seen with one of the bird illustrations in a book. The scaly pattern over their breast and the finch like beak were prominent pointers, apart from their colour.They were munias. And how apt their entire name was, Scaly breasted munia!

For a bird, their existence near the ground for prolonged periods appeared surprising to me. From some literature, I came to know that they feed on the grass seeds and insects near the ground and prefer building nests in low bushes. That explained their behaviour. When they weren't busy eating near the grass, they would fly up to the branches and perch calmly. Their sound to me felt like a milder version of the sparrow's sound and also less regular. When in the winter, the grass all dried up and later cleared away, the munias weren't there to be seen near our house for a long time. The monsoon came and the grass grew back and there they were again with their clan! While I wasn't satisfied with their photos captured during the first monsoon, they came out slightly better in the second season. Here are a couple of them.

Although munia appeared more like a finch to me, I saw that it doesn't belong to the conventional family of finches. The baya weaver, the sparrow and the munia, all belong to the same family, Ploceidae.

-Vindy

On The Go...

(Sometime around the end of Sharad rutu, early Dec 2009)

Early mornings, now-a-days, are slightly chilly, as if the waiting winter were slowly crawling upon me. With the weather Gods going crazy and all confused this season, winter seems to have resolved to put things back into their place and restore the familiar order in earnest. And so, with no more surprises expected and as a meek acknowledgement to the increasing cold, my reluctance at shedding my blanket and shrug out of my bed has increased in proportion; with that the repeated attempts of my mother to wake me up and get me moving and to my office; and so have come out my sweaters and the black Peter England coat. The winter giggles all along at me as I finally manage to hit the pedal. Me and my poor friend, who must have bore the cold brunt all night in the open, set about gulping distances by circumferences.

My friend is sent through violent shocks and jerks by the few metres of kuchcha road, and so am I with him; awaking both of us from the stiffness and dullness of the incomplete slumber. The landscape plummets down in front of us pulling down with it the quiet houses and farms, before the mountains far away lift it up towards the sky. They aren't very far away though, what with they almost filling up your sight and their essence percolating through your senses and soul. They surely do strike a pleasant, magical chord, almost enthusing a gladdening, familiar scent of the mountains all around you and within you. The winter, however, has played a beautiful trick on these harmless humps on the earth. It has brought all its mist clogging down, thick and dense, under the mountains to stay there, such that one can't see through them. The mighty mountains, as a result, appear to have been lifted nonchalantly up by the indolent congregation of the dense mass of vapour. It looks enchanting, I tell you. The sun's slowly peeking above the horizon, almost with a yawn, sending down warm rays to mix with and glisten the white mass of mist. If only I had my camera with me! Where, however, would I capture the smell and the cold feel of the winter that's tingling its way through me, perching on my nosetip, sprawling on my ears and setting into my eyes?

I pedal further down the now smooth road, breezing down the straights and around the bends. My numb fingers try to control my overjoyed friend. He is sprinting across, ignoring the undulations on tar. His bell calls are met with happy responses from his chums; the sparrows, bulbuls, mynas, crows, munias, shrikes and others and that's the cause of his joy. We pass the Krishna temple smiling our greetings to him. He smiles back at us, serene and healing as ever.

At the station, I bid a goodbye to my friend, promising to return at dark. I am amongst people now; my kind. The early morning crowd includes many youngsters, high-school students to college going teenagers. Everybody is geared up for the cold weather. From rural folks in plain dhoti and stained shirts to milk vendors and vegetable vendors with their huge cans and baskets to office going people like me to the teenagers, the station is buzz with activity and conversations. Herds are what I feel I am seeing along the length of the station and the faces wearing multitudes of emotion appear like ruminating on the daily dose of conversation and gossip. The newspaper guy is in the thick of action and everybody's more than eager to grab his/her copy. I always walk half the platform towards the far end to climb the train there. There's no reason for that, just a preference. I have a few minutes before the local train would arrive allowing me to take an easy stroll across the platform in my comfortable canvas pair.

My hand brushes my warm coat at its sides as I walk. I try to keep my head steady, but my fickle, flickering eyes give away my curiosity. I can't help but notice the girls whispering to each other. I cast a glance on the group and my eyes are held captive by a complimenting pair, pure, black and mesmerizing (as Onkar says, I think in my mind :-)). What follows is a strange status quo as far as expressions on both the faces are concerned as against a distracting and confusing hustle inside, behind the falsely held expressions. Both the individuals stuck in the deadlock become exceedingly wary of every movement and each sinew asks permissions before it can twitch. Intervened by a conscious mind now, my involuntary walking and poise suddenly assume proportions of a foreground process requiring extensive-complex-real time-stimuli based-decision making algorithms. Where the conscious mind sets in, I lose the fluidity of my sub-conscious self. She follows suit and her posture stiffens laying bare her own susceptible processes which have evidently gone awry by a little disturbance. Until my friend, ‘inertia’, thankfully carries me ahead and beyond the threshold distance disengaging the bond, we both go through a strange metastable state in our minds which can neither be defined as outright enjoyable nor as entirely uneasy. The effect sweeps across the group. Every individual goes through the brief wave trying to win attention and pleasantly sail with the occasion if it happens. Depending on various sensory parameters (primarily audio-visual) and their weights in position and time, any two individuals may get connected or there might be a sequence of multiple short connections. Let me accept that this is indeed a natural sociological behaviour in animals and the aforesaid events and effects form the normal protocol in mortal beings like me. Anyway, the point is that you feel for it. It is almost like an instinct driven by the irresistible laws of attraction and which renders every post-adolescence individual predictable and helpless in such situations. It pleases the heart and rides the mind and there’s not much one can do about it except wait for time to take care of and tone down this instinct, if it ever does. Besides, since I am no Yogi, I often follow the ritual and enjoy the uneasy transients and muse in the pleasant feelings that blot my heart as the experience trails. And so, I do the ritual today again. And boy! Am I not pleased! She looks beautiful, doesn’t she!

- Vindy :)

Lightning experiments

It was happening again yesterday. Heavenly flares and flashes were lighting up the backdrop behind that hillock and the immediate neighbourhood. Akshay came running to me, bursting with excitement at the spurts of illumination which were creating magnificent, isolated silhouettes of the hillock, the clouds and the tall receiver station, in an otherwise dark sky. As I broke into a beaming smile and let go a rapturous 'tokk', I realised that despite seeing this almost every other day here, at Talegaon, it still evoked a wonderous feeling. Far away, beyond the hillock and the mountain lines perhaps, a possessed clan of clouds and the crazy earth must be playing with their charges!

I have never seen before lightning with such regularity as I have seen in Talegaon. The location of this place between mountains on many sides and more importantly the vastness of perceptible space seem to make this possible. Unlike a metropolitan, where visibility is limited by structures and their immense density, this place is not that badly cluttered and not so populated as yet. Hence our terrace affords a lavish view across the countryside right until the horizon which in this case is largely undulated by mountainous hunches. And not just on one side, but in almost all the directions. The feeling, when I spend evenings sitting on the water tank at the top of my building, is akin to those I have had on numerous treks; a view spanning the earth as much as it could!  When I lift may gaze slightly skyward I see myriad and plenty clouds and realize their movements. Sample this – In cities, either there are clouds or there are no clouds; either it thunders and throws lightning or doesn't; it either rains or it doesn't. But here, I can see dense clouds, not here, but a few kilometers away over that mountain; I can sense the rains to my right and sunshine in front of me; I can sit down here without fear and still watch in awe furious lightning striking somewhere in a distance! I can sense nature at work in its various forms at different places at the same time, as if it were running numerous parallel processes, all of them distinctly visible to me.
 

Somewhere along this experience I thought I should try to capture images of lightning. There are, anyway, many spectacular images of this phenomenon already available across web and other literature, and still I wanted to experiment with my camera. Although this was a long cherished idea, I thought I had good chances of getting a good result here. I started with the first noticeable rains of this monsoon and have made a few attempts since. With a digital camera like mine, it is pretty simple. Trying to click at precisely that moment when lightning strikes is obviously not a very wise option. One might instead think of utilizing the features in a good enough camera. All you need is a fairly prolonged shutter speed (which means keeping the shutter open for atleast a few seconds) and loads of patience. Based on the other conditions, one may have to adjust other settings in the camera, like keeping the aperture small when exposing for a long time to reduce the insurge from other areas in the frame. With a long exposure, a steady surface for the camera is advisable while capturing the image. The lightning, if it strikes in exactly that window of time when shutter's open, is bright enough to create a reasonable impression, as also to leave the rest of the frame fairly illuminated. The settings may have to be adjusted bearing these things in mind. Patience is a very important trait in this pursuit and that can convert the matter of luck to a matter of time, before you get your desired result.
 

A few days ago, I felt, I finally got a satisfactory image. Hence this post :P
 

I would like to share some of the images of lightning that I have captured till now. Apart from scaling the images, I have worked around, slightly, with these images in GIMP, mainly modifying the picture curve to reduce unwanted illumination from lightning, of adjoining areas. (But believe me, the pictures look equally good with that illumination) 

The first one was captured on June 11, 2010. This one struck right behind the Harneshwar tekdi and I captured it from my balcony. Since it was pitch dark, the camera couldn't focus well enough.
 

The second one was taken on September 28, 2010. This lightning was snapped over the trademark mountain near Talegaon, around which Indrayani meanders. This lightning seems to be a cloud­-cloud discharge. I captured this from my terrace.

 The third one was photographed on November 21, 2010. This one's similar to the second in location. However I got really lucky with (wonder of wonders!) three lightning strikes in the captured frame. I was literally jumping with joy and singing merrily for the rest of the day!
 

Here's some of the exif data for this image if anyone's interested.
Exposure Time: 13 sec.
ISO Speed Rating: 200
Flash Fired: Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode.
Metering Mode: Center­Weighted Average
Exposure Program: Manual
Focal Length: 9.9 mm
 

One interesting capture in this above image is the region in the vicinity of the mountain surface and the tail of the rightmost lightning. The air in that region seems to have been blown away or vastly influenced by the lightning strike. I wonder what the effect actually is! (Maybe related to streamers...or...impact..or..anyway) Here's that zoomed part.
 

Lalit had written a very interesting and informative post on lightning and related observations in his blog some time ago. Here's the link for that article.

- Vindy :)