maybe my heart is full of sky

so maybe the only thing separating loving and living is an oh of amazement – the breathless sound the sky makes when falling the final gradient from dusk to twilight and back again, the way your eyes keep searching for stars only an evenmist away, how your fingertips keep feeling for worlds closeted within atoms,…

Advertisement

Journal Journeys: Solitude of the Ghats

I want to say to it, come back. Let me see you.

Whistling Wonders

I will never stop being excited about the Western Ghats. There, even being woken up in the morning is a thrilling experience, because the bird doing the waking up is the Malabar Whistling Thrush, a bird you will see - or, more likely than not, hear - nowhere else in the world. The Ghats have…

The Pansy’s Pose

I first saw a blue pansy in the butterfly field guide I picked up on a whim at a stall from our local nature society. It captivated me: I found the brilliance of its colors, elegance in its wings immensely attractive, and vowed to see it in Singapore. It would be years (well, two) before…

Creeping Suspicions

I have a creeping suspicion treecreepers are much more interesting than their color scheme and name makes them out to be.

Swamphen Days

Barcelona's Llobregat Delta proved to be a fruitful trip for me. However, birds I could identify were in a minority - which, thankfully, included this Purple Swamphen. I can now profess myself to be intimately familiar with this species, after having documented them in the Sandpit Swamphens, based on observations of them in Bangalore this…

Flurries of Excitement

We take a break from our (semi)regular posts to bring you a flock of assorted Whimbrels, Common Greenshanks, (possibly?) a few Pacific Golden Plovers... and ten Black-tailed Godwits. To be frank, the Black-tailed Godwit isn't a particularly impressive or beautiful bird. It is the dull brown that graces most waders; its black-tipped bill is the…

And to Each His Throne

In the Pyrenees of Spain, somehow this (unidentified) bird manages to maintain a ridiculous level of self-contained superiority while sitting on what is really a pile of horse manure.

Birding the Chaff

Put it simply, I do not know European birds. Which is why I saw this one and sighed. Its vagueish eyebrow indicated its membership of that hated family: leaf warblers. A brief history - I have seen several in the Himalayas, probably some in the Western Ghats, and a total of nil have been identified.…

Fair of Face

Ok, so this photo may or may not have been taken over a year ago. In my defence: #TBT. Or #TBM. Whatever. Still, this remains one of my most treasured moments from our trip to Kenya. Clichéd as it may sound - we were about to turn back, on our very, very last safari, when…