Saturday, November 29, 2008

life in my back yard

thinking of all the deaths in mumbai, i look around the house and i find life. life not just as we know it, but new life and all forms of it.
there is a pigeon couple(if they have couples!) that had made their nest securely between the air-conditioner in 'my' room and the floor of the balcony. now skipping why the ac was taken off, the point is last night the pigeon and their nest were exposed to the big bad open world. ma and i finally came up with the idea of covering it with a shoe box, but it didn't work. finally after having scared the pigeons away twice, leaving the little chicks probably all scared and worried we managed to satisfy our worries and left it to nature and the pigeon's maternal instincts to take control from there. this afternoon when i woke up(yes afternoon, morning is going to bed time :P) ma informed me the chicks and their mommy were back on track...food n milk courtesy my mother's hospitality! as of now, they are comfortably sitting in my balcony and no one is allowed in it, lest we scare them again.
these pics i've loaded are really from my backyard. this nest was hidden in the leaves in a creeper!! i don't quite remember which bird but she definately wasn't around when i went photo hunting. the nest i remember quite clearly was very strategically hidden under the big leaves and practically suspended in mid-air. the chicks look so limbless(compared to my previous animated exposure!) and almost merge into the nest. the pigeon's chicks though, as i saw them last night in the moonlight, were much bigger, furrier and pale yellowish-whitish.




this parrot here is from the hollow barren tree across my house, and directly across my li'l cove. i simply love this snap...one major reason being i managed to click without shaking my hands!
the next two snaps are of a woodpecker...i'll try putting up the video too.

4 comments:

ABHi said...

hey there's this pegion nest right next to my room's window as well... and that too is more or less occupied throughout the year... yes throughout the year... every now and then a pegion couple (if they have couples!)comes raises their chicks and flies away...

nice post!... different...

Chronicler said...

brilliant pics there... i too had a pigeon family residing in my room...sometime back.. but now they've left their penthouse..that is the top of a wooden shelf.. and flown to places faraway.. n there's a street dog that tags along to mother dairy everytime...

Siddharth Gupta said...

Nice post, especially since I'm a nature-lover myself; and since I'm also an amateur birdwatcher, I just had to point this out. The bird that you identified as a woodpecker isn't one. It's actually a Coppersmith Barbet. Barbets are fairly common birds in Delhi, easily identifiable because they're big and green :)

Here's a link: http://www.birding.in/birds/Piciformes/Megalaimidae/coppersmith_barbet.htm

Unknown said...

@ sid
thanks for letting me know! my bird watching abilities are restricted to admiring the colour n the bird in general...know how of their names is not really my cup of tea.
next time i spot this one, i know who i'm looking at!