10 of us BNHS members met at Belapur and decided to walk up the khargar hills led Dr.Tarin.
As per our original plan we were to climb up the temple steps at Belapur, but decided to skip the same, as we presumed that it would be quite slippery due to the continuous rains.
Dr. Tarin suggested we go to Khargar hills as the road has been opened up after quite sometime and it is quite possible that this will give us a good sighting of birds, who were starved of human visits.
Starting at the base after parking our cars, we first sighted an ashy prinia carrying twigs. The walk uphill was quite thrilling as we saw a lot of butterflies, the common yellow, common crow, orange tip, sailor, jezebals, et al. A quarter way up, we spotted a plain prinias, chirping away to glory or trying to fool us away from the nest or warning of danger ahead. We could get some fantastic pictures of the bird. The common Iora was next on the list an
d when the cameras started rolling, it just came out of the bushes and perched on a branch where there was excellent sunlight, thus giving us a great photo opportunity. Then we saw some red vented bulbuls and lo behold the bharadwaj in flight was a great spectacle. Just then there was shouts of a raptor flying and all of us trained our binocs on the great raptor .. a pergrine falcon or a shaheen falcon!!!!!!I could capture some pics of the bird while it was circling above.
I recently put this pic up on India nature watch and it has been identified as the Black Shaheen falcon.
Up and up we walked when we spotted a pair of green bee eaters, dusky craig martins, could hear the calls of malabar whistling thrush, and white throated kingfisher.
Once up in the beautiful valley with huge rocks projecting high up , a lovely place to be, one of our members Prakash exclaimed... that this is an area where you get 100 % oxygen refill for your body. Truly. We saw a lot of dusky craig martins building their mud nests on the rocks. The small waterfalls were a beautiful site with some of friends sipping the sweet cool water, natural mineral water sans the pesticide.
This is spot for the malabar whistling thrush, however today it had decided to fly away, probably to some other spot .
We then started the descent and once again could spot ashy prinias, plain prinias, red whiskered bul buls, common iora, green bee eaters and a lot of butterflies.
The trail ended with exchange of emails, notes and recall of the birds we saw and heard making this day a great one and fun for us naturalists at navi mumbai.
