Dear all:
Swarna, Shashank Dalvi and me returned from a 5-day trip to Manas National Park in Assam. Manas is an absolutely fantastic park -- obviously with its own conservation pressures -- offering fantastic habitat for a wide range of rare and threatened wildlife. It is like an 'Eastern Corbett' of sorts -- dense jungle, grasslands & clearings, the beautiful Manas river and the contiguous forests and mountains of Bhutan to the North. We visited three parts -- Koklabari on the east (for the floricans), the picturesque Mothanguri (the heart of the national park) and Ultapani on the west (for golden langurs and hornbills). The first and the third have a loose reserved forest status though part of the overall Manas biosphere reserve.
The main motivation to visit Manas is the purpose of this post -- the locate the world's rarest bustard. To our pleasant surprise they are flourishing in Manas and we counted more than ten floricans (including a female), all of them atleast half a kilometer away. India holds 85% of the world's Bengal Florican population and Manas has India's largest population. The breeding male's plumage looks like an avian King Kong and they do a sort of a jump-flight display in no particular frequency. Unlike the lesser florican, these males cover both vertical and horizontal distance before crash landing in grass almost head first!
One image can do no justice to this phenomenal exhibition but here is a cropped image from a series of 35-images of a single jump-flight that lasted about 4-5 seconds. I missed my 800mm which was with Canon for a failed power diaphragm.
Image hosted here: http://www.indianaturewatch.net/displayimage.php?id=149694
Cheers,
-r-
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