Corbett | Dreams of grassland

This year end visit included a visit to Corbett, Gethiya ( a small village in Nainital ) and Sattal. I had always wanted to visit Corbett mainly for its grasslands.Watch this space for a writeup and images

A white wagtail forages for insects in the grass in morning light. This wagtail is also called pied wagtail and is common in this region. This image is more about the morning "setting" rather than the species itself :)

White Wagtail | Corbett

A ruddy shelduck swims along in the evening light. We saw a huge flock of them enroute to sitabani forest.

Ruddy Shelduck | Ramnagar

When taking safaris in Corbett there are multiple options in terms of the zones present. The 5 zones are Bijrani, Jhirna, Dhikala, Dhela and Durgadevi. These zones have a mix dense forest mainly comprising of sal trees and grasslands made up by the tall elephant grass. I was mainly interested in grasslands since that is where the light is nice and the overall setting for an image works out well. Based on this I chose Dhela and Dhikala. 70% of the zone in Dhela is grasslands. Unfortunately in Dhikala we used canter vehicles ( not recommended at all for photography ) so though the settings in Dhikala were amazing very little could be done from a photography point of view.

Dhela Grasslands | Corbett

After going around in the dhela grassland we ended up visiting the same spot from where i made the above image only that this time it was sunset. The same spot at different time of the day conveys a different mood.

Sunset@Dhela Grasslands | Corbett

The crimson sunbird was a resident bird in the place where we stayed in corbett. An extremely lovely bird all of 11cms long. Though it had a fairly fixed path before coming back to its resting spot, the resting spot itself was at an elevation and I could not get the complete bird in view. The bird itself shuttled between its resting spot and a nearby creeper that had flowers which are called lobster claws :) Google lobster claws flower to see what i am referring to :) In the transit it used to stop at a plant which was at eye level before moving to its resting spot. After 3 days of visiting the place multiple times on one instance it stopped at the transit point for a few seconds and i managed to make couple of images. One other interesting trivia i came across about this bird is Crimson sunbird is now officially declared as the National bird of Singapore.

Crimson Sunbird | Corbett

The Kosi river is a 168km long Himalayan river that originates in Almora district in Kumaon passing through Ramnagar town before finally joining the Ramganga river. Made this image in the evening after the sun had just gone down.

Kosi River | Ramnagar