Postcard from India

A comedy of errors on the prelude to a tour to Central India saw me arriving days after the rest of the group having had visa difficulties that saw me camped in London for two days at the start. The pain did not stop there as I managed to get robbed within days of arriving too... That said (!) the tour went very well and although we missed leopard and wild dog we did hit all our other targets and saw some good birds and dragonflies too.

I arrived in time to catch the last two lions of the trip at Gir Forest, two males that walked close by the jeep in the halflight of dawn. So close we were enveloped in lion odour, certainly wakes you up. Gir also produced up to five forest wagtails a day, a scarce bird in Gujarat normally and two white-bellied minivets.

In previous trips Velavadar has been unkind to us, but it came up trumps this year with a splendid sighting of an adult striped hyaena and three pups at dawn.

Velavadar kept on giving, half an hour later we had tracked down a superb wolf, driving past a rock eagle-owl to get to it!

Velavadar was not finished, first one and then two Amur falcons turned up hunting insects over the wetland as we enjoyed a walk after all the mammals. This is a tough bird to find in India.

We had an excellent couple of night sessions with Raj from Desert Coursers at Zainabad (Little Rann of Kutch). This Indian nightjar posed nicely, we also had 8 Sykes's nightjar and a superb encounter with a desert cat.

Pallid scops-owls are showing well near Zainabad this year. One of nine owl species seen during the tour. Mottled wood-owl still eludes me though...

No interest in Odonates on the tour, but I plugged away picking up 24 species including one of my favourite damsels, Rhodischnura nursei.

Six days at Kanha at the end of the trip produced four sightings of tiger but most were brief. We had 3-4 minutes with this female but suffered from several dry days when no-one was seeing or getting close to cats.