After a long lull on 20th March 2016 myself , Ashish (my son) & Anupam (my son’s friend) decided to visit Chandlai for a birding and photography trip, Chandlai is one of the few among the depleting water-bodies that remains on the outskirts of Jaipur (Rajasthan).The majority of the water-bodies have now dried up or been consumed by the rampant modernisation & expansion of the city.
There was great excitement in the air as we started at 6 am from our residence, Chandlai is approximately 35 kms from our place. We first stopped at Barkheda pond and strolled around for half n hour in search of birds, however we found that the ponds had very little water and the majority of the trenches had dried up during the initial heat wave in the month of March. There were few patches where we found few Black winged stilts,Citrene Wagtails,White browed wagtails,Paddy field pipit feeding during the early morning hour.A lone river tern flew past overhead and disappeared in the early morning mist. Few cormorants and egrets were preening, perched on the banyan tree.
From Barkheda we moved towards Chandlai, which is 4 Kms away, the track towards Chandlai is a little bumpy but still it was fun and the expectations were high on the cards…
Bar headed geese , that was the first sight as we reached at Chandlai lake, can’t call it a lake now since there are very few patches of water-bodies left during this time of the year, however we were excited to watch a group of 15 to 20 Bar headed geese busy feeding in the lake. We moved very slowly towards the group without disturbing their activities to have a close look at their feeding and preening activities, while moving closer we found a pair of Little ringed plover moving swiftly and feeding in the swampy area , we were lucky to get few shots of the plovers at a close range, it is generally very tough to attain focus on these little plovers as they move swiftly and stop for few seconds while feeding.
As we moved closer towards the group of geese, they were very comfortable and had got used to our presence and were busy with their feeding activities and we crouched and took our positions near the boulders and positioned our gears & started clicking ….
A group of geese flew past overhead and started landing bang in front of us , giving us an opportunities to click few action shots..
Apart from some serious birding , few funny moments were also captured 😉
Finally the sun was high up on our heads and we felt the scorching heat , so it was time to say goodbye to Chandlai with a hope to revisit the place next time to have a nice birding experience.
Since this is my first blog on my birding trip, hope you will tolerate my novice writing skills and grammatical errors…
Cheers !!!!
AjayNairPhotography 