I moved into Bangalore 10 years back and stayed mostly in well populated areas where the most commonly seen birds were crows and eagles. Recently I have moved into a new locality in the outskirts of South Bangalore where there is a considerable bird population. I won’t be too much off the mark if I say that I see more birds and insects than humans when I spend an average day at home! It has been a very exciting experience going behind these birds with my newly acquired camera and here are some results of the same. I am yet the learn the art of bird watching and hence most of the shots here are taken with maximum zoom (20x w/o tripod of course) and hence are not all that clear.
The most largest and easiest to photograph are birds which I think are cow egrets. These keep following the cows that come near my home everyday for grazing.
My work room window opens into a vacant site which has a few Sapodilla (Chikko, Sapota) trees . (This locality was apparently a farm land earlier). These trees are favourite hangouts for some beautiful tiny birds (around 3 inches in length). I am not qualified yet to identify the names of these birds. Here are some pics of them taken from inside my window with fullest possible zoom of my camera.
Here is another tiny one on the roadside parthenium plant.
Along with Mainas, there is another kind of bird, roughly as same size as Maina which comes in groups of 8 to 10. These are quite fearless of humans and provide some photographic opportunities.
Another bird which allows itself to be photographed fairly easily is what we call ಕೆಂಭೂತ in Kannada.
Parrot is one bird which sounds so common, but I hardly remember seeing it anywhere else than in zoos. Photographing this bird was difficult since it hardly remained at one place at a time. And most of the times, it blended so well with the green foilage that it was hard to spot.
This black bird is so often mentioned in various books and poems, but I should confess that I saw this for the first time. It look exactly like a crow, but slightly smaller in size with distinctive red eyes. One could easily ignore this as a crow, but this is the Koel. I was observing it for quite a few days without knowing it as koel, until I heard it calling out, which was unmistakably koel’s sound. I had read the comparison between crow and koel in the form of poems and stories in the childhood and I was glad to experience it and verify it first hand. One such saying in Sanskrit comes to mind: को भेदः काक-पिकयोः ? वसंतकाले संप्राप्ते काकः काकः पिकः पिकः | (which roughly translates as this: What’s the difference b/n crow and koel ? When Spring arrives, crow will be crow and koel will be koel)
Here is an other elusive one.
I never knew there were cuckoos which are not black in colour like the below one:
This one posed for the photograph without much hesitation.
Kingfishers are regular visitors to my home given the proximity to the lake.
So moving into this new neighbourhood has been an interesting experience. There are many other birds which have remained still elusive for my camera, I wish I had a better camera to do full justice to the beauty of these birds!
Posted by Bharata 
Bharata B Rao's Blog 