Dear Lord

14 October, 2009

Indra,
The Lord of the Gods and Chief Rain Maker,
South Asian Affairs,
Heaven.

Rain to the dry zone in Sri Lanka

Dear Lord,

How are you?

It's been a while since I wrote to you. Pardon me for this slightly longish communication.

First, thank you very much for the new Canon 100-400mm lens! I have been thoroughly enjoying it, as you can see from the pictures embedded in this letter. I am now sort of admiring the looks of the Canon 500mm f4.5 lens, its amazing curves and all that.

My Lord, why I am writing to you this time is for a totally different matter. I visited Bundala and Yala National Parks in the dry zone from 5-10 October, just by myself. As you are aware, that part of Sri Lanka is experiencing a severe drought right now. Which of course in anothing new—it being a usual weather pattern. My previous local experiences suggest that you are extremely meticulous in ending this prolonged drought by the mid October. This being that time of the year, I just thought of writing to you to give you a gentle reminder—what with you having to deal with global climatic distabilisation and all that. As you may have heard from many, rains are badly needed to the 2/3rd of this island that makes the dry zone.

I know that you are generous enough to bring rains to the wet zone too during this time of the year. Frankly, we have had plenty of rain where I live in the wet zone, so if you are like in a squeeze or something, please feel okay to direct all those rain clouds to the dry zone—the area with a more pressing need for rain right now.

Coming back to the aforementioned trip, the nearest reason for undertaking this twitching trip (pardon my birding slang) was a Pectoral Sandpiper that was reported by my friend, Chinthaka Kalutota, from the Bundala National Park. Despite making three visits to this magnificent Ramsar wetland site, I drew a blank. Other local birders too had failed to locate it. It's not like I did not try, my Lord. I walked for miles in hot, baking sun in the Bundala lagoon, barefoot, getting feet like this. No, those gum-boots of mine just won’t work in our mudflats. Just, where the hell is that bird? I heard somebody mentioning that only God knows it. Hence the question, pardon me.

My dear Lord, thank you for that Glossy Ibis. Gosh! I mean, God! That really was a consolation! It remained a bogey bird of sorts for me for...god knows how many years, until you finally revealed it. A pair of them at the Embilikala lagoon. Just great!

The Oriental Darter population is doing extremely well at Bundala. This one was doing a Usain Bolt and I thought you might like it, as it sort of would remind you of the weapon you wield: thunderbolt, which you use to slay the dragon, who is like causing all this drought—by enveloping the rain clouds. Just an innocent attempt at imitative magic, that's all.


Those Oriental Pratincoles, which you revealed in flight, were also good, though you only gave me record shots.

Noteworthy migrants that formed larger flocks were Curlew Sandpiper, Lesser Sand Plover, Black-tailed Gotwit, and Little Stint. A single non-breeding Red-necked Phalarope and several Sanderlings were some of the other interesting ones. Here's the kind of flocks you revealed to me.


Did you know that Yala National Park, which is traditionally closed from 1 Sep to 15 Oct annually, was kept opened for visitors this year by the wildlife authorities? That is right, no unofficial 'open season' for poachers this year! Taking advantage of this, I visited this premier National Park on four game drives.

Words cannot express my gratitude for you for finding this Leopard, just minutes after entering the park, on my first game drive.


It was just 3.30 in the afternoon. We had just arrived at a waterhole named, Palugas-wala No.1—a popular Leopard hotspot at Yala. Suddenly, alarm calls of the Hanuman Langurs filled the air. They beckoned that that a Leopard may be close by.



There were just two other jeeps at the site. Before I could even get my pair of binoculars to scan the surroundings, our sharp-eyed tracker, Sujith, spotted that Leopard making its way towards the now dried up northern end of the waterhole. It was a very sturdy-looking male. And I couldn't help going, “OMG!”

Did you hear it?  Just kidding!

It turned out to be this individual rather meanly meanly nicknamed by the locals as “Pottaya”—a derogatory reference to person who is blind in one eye in Sinhala.


Do you know why it's blind in one eye? I heard one commenting that only god knows; hence the question.

Anyway, it did a very measured circuit around the waterhole, walking very confidently in the open theatre-like conditions at the site. It was watched closely by a large Wild Buffalo chilling in the mud, which held its ground unintimidated, after repositioning itself not to lose sight of the predator. During its stroll, the Leopard marked its territory by spraying urine to several of the trees, you know, like cats usually do.


I observed this magnificent cat for a good 1 1/2hours, even though you were willing to give me a longer views, if I had wanted.

You were so lovely to have punctuated this prolonged Leopard sighting with plenty of non-feline pleasures. This Green Bee-Eater that sat nearby was just one of them.


Again, you were terrific in giving me interesting compositions of the Leopard and the Wild Buffalo.


Here's a crop of the feline half, and showing its better half.


After a while, a Wild Boar male arrived to quench his thirst; thereby forming this tense triangle
.

It was like finding RD, DB, and NB in the same bar.
As the Leopard went into a marathon lounging session., it was behaving more like our pet cats. And by 5.00 p.m., I've had enough of this view.


Guess it was telling us to just get lost!

While Sujith suggested that we stayed to see whether it would come to drink at the waterhole nearer to us, with a huge Wild Buffalo laying claim to it, I thought it may not happen too early.

Therefore, instead of lingering on at that site, I suggested to move on to explore other sites good for Leopards, as the time was just right for them. This turned out to be a good move as minutes after entering the main road, that's like at 5.40 p.m., we saw a Leopard crossing the road. Two jeeps that arrived at the junction at that very moment, however, missed that brief crossing episode.

While that saw them making a beeline to the point where the said crossing took place, Sujith came up with a battlefield manoeuver, and commanded the driver to take a different road to outflank the Leopard. Having done that, he then got the driver to kill the engine and bring the jeep to a gradual stop at a certain point. And then, he urged everybody to keep an eye on a particular area. Expecting the low light conditions, I had my camera ready with appropriate settings to take the target before that. Seconds later, a Leopard materialised slowly from the thick shrubbery, and Sujith was the first to spot it.

I managed to get a burst of shots of this glance, which it held for about 20 seconds, clearly looking bemused as to how we had managed to zero in on it!


What brilliant field craft by Sujith!

Returning to my hotel after this exciting game drive, I learnt from those who hung around near the first Leopard site that it had not come to drink but instead vanished to the jungle few minutes after we left. God! You really work in mysterious ways. Don’t You?

Although the three game drives done after this, yielded just 2 Leopards between them, they gave us plenty of other interesting wildlife sightings. One of them was observing a bask of over 90 Mugger Crocodiles in the dried beds of Buttuwa Tank.


It was a veritable croc farm. On my last game drive I found this dead Wild Buffalo there, surrounded by, you know who. Need I remind you of the severity of the drought?


Gosh! I should stop now. One last request; could you please go easy on lightening this time? I just don't want to lose another router.

Thanking you,

Respectfully yours,

Amila Salgado

Description of Acute Paucity of Bird Posts Syndrome (APOBPS), Its Diagnosis, Treatment and Stuff Like That in Relation to a Bird Blog in Sri Lanka

By Amila Salgado

Abstract
Acute Paucity of Bird Posts Syndrome (APOBPS) is described for the first time. Notes on its diagnosis, complications, implications and possible ramifications are discussed in relation to an affected bird blog in Sri Lanka. Results follow a prospective observational study over one year to formally characterise this condition. A possible treatment is suggested in relation to the Sri Lankan case, based on positive results seen in pre-clinical evaluations and stuff like that.


Plate 1 A Positive symptom: This is a Large fly (Order: Diptera) in my home garden 11 Sep, 2009.

Keywords: digiscoping, digiscopy, blogosphere, birding, APOBPS, blog, canon 100-400 f4.5-5.6L Lens.

Introduction.
A bird blog is an online journal of bird and birding related stuff of a birder (Salgado, 2007). Bird blogs that strictly discuss birds and birding related matters are essentially rare these days. This is evident from the fact that even the top bird bloggers leaving room to discuss non-birding matters in their blogs (Bergin et al. 2007).

Therefore, the modern attitude seems to suggest that a certain amount of non-birding content is not too unhealthy for a bird blog after all. This seems reasonable given the diversity of "other things" a birder confronts during birding explorations.

However, an recent obserations have have shown that certain bird blogs seem to constantly deviate from posting bird and birding content, leading to the condition identified here for the first time as Acute Paucity of Bird Posts Syndrome (APOBPS). It is characterised by gradual drop in bird posts in blogs that are portrayed to the outside world primarily as bird blogs.

Symptoms and diagnosis.
You open a bird blog and see a frigging dragonfly first, or such thingamajig that have absolutely nothing to do with birds.


Plate 2: A positively positive symptom: Elusive Adjutant Aethriamanta brevipennis brevipennis young male in my home garden, Kaduwela, Sri Lanka.

Other such deviations include posts dedicated to grasshoppers, garden spiders, beetles, shrub frogs, butterflies, snakes, stick insects, robberflies, Leopards and even Blue Whales, for heaven's sake!


Plate 3: An advanced symptom: Robber fly (Order: Diptera) feeding on a tiny fly (Order: Diptera) in my home garden, Kaduwela, Sri Lanka.


Basically, any bird blog that has less than 65 % of bird and birding-related posts can be taken as APOBPS positive cases.

At the onset of the APOBPS, bird blogs show a high frequency of recurring theme posts such as Macro Monday (Salgado, 2009b), Wordless Wednesday (Ciccone, 2009b) and Sky Watch Friday (Tabib, 2009) in an obsessive compulsive sort of way, with very little or no birding content. Note: the latter used to be called Tabib's Bird Blog when I discovered it.

In extreme cases affected bird blogs carry dedicated non-bird posts in serial-post style (Salgado, 2009c).
Initial investigations confirm the prevalence of APOBPS symptoms increasingly in bird blogs that are linked with affected blogs (Ciccone, 2009a), raising new fears whether APOBPS could grow into pandemic propotions. Studies are currenly under way to ascertain this.

Ramifications.
If untreated, APOBPS results in an affected bird blog to transmogrify into one other than a bird blog., i.e. a natural history blog. Its overall implications and visitor traffic needs to be assessed further.

A prospective observational study (or something like that).
Digiscopy has been my preferred method of photographing birds since time immemorial. That's like since 2004. It basically involves the attachment of a digital camera to the eyepiece of a spotting scope, using a homemade adapter or mount and shooting through the lens of the spotting scope to take cracking photographs (Poh, 1999).

This in my case is currently achieved through a Kowa TSN 823 telescope (with 20-60 x zoom eye-piece) with Nikon Coolpix 5100 camera—both married together with custom-made adapters.

So in other words, if I have a bird to photograph in the wild now, I would reach for my digiscoping gear rather than my point and shoot: Panasonic Lumix FZ-18 camera, although the latter has the capacity for achieving decent results as shown in Plate 4.


Plate 4 Serendib Scops Owl Otus thilohoffmani photographed at night time. Aug, 2008.

Over the years, I have taken some decent shots by means of digiscoping (Plate 5 and Plate 6 - using Nikon Coolpix 4500). Some of them have featured in articles authored and co-authored by me (Salgado, 2006 and Goodale et al. 2008) and authored by others (Lord, 2007 and Ritschard and Schweizer, 2007) in journals and magazines, local and overseas.


Plate 5. A Red-faced Malkoha Phaenicophaeus pyrrhocephalus with a Giant stick insect Phobaeticus hypharpax prey in the beak at Sinharaja 'World Heritage' rain forest, Sri Lanka. This image was used in an article by me in Forktail - The Journal of Asian Ornithology.
Plate 6. Chestnut-backed Owlet Glaucidium castanononum Digiscoped in Jan 2007 at Sinharaja 'World Heritage' Rain forest. This image was used by Ritschard and Schweizer in 2007 for an article in BirdingAsia 7.

However, as of recently for multitude of reasons I have not been motivated enough to do digiscoping of birds much. In all honesty, I would have loved to have photographed some of those birds seen. But, I simply have lacked the inner drive, the hunger, the killer instinct to bag a photograph of a bird by means of digiscoping.
This accounts for the drought of bird images and bird posts, which has gradually pushed this blog to a APOBPS postive one.

Let me be honest. Birds were my first love—the very reason why I fell in love with nature. It will always be like that. So I always like to portray myself as a birder although with time I have acquired interests in natural history. Okay, without getting too emo, let’s dig deep to the reasons, which have led to APOBPS in Gallicissa one by one.

1. Realisation that digiscoping and 'point and shoots' cannot achieve crisp images consistently as one can using dSLR photography.

Since converting to dSLR (with the aim of doing macro photography) in Sep, 2008, I have been convinced of the sheer capabilities and merits of dSLR photography. In simple, dSLR photography has raised my standards and expectations as a photographer and has opened my eyes to understanding photography a bit better.

After comparing my bird shots with stunning bird images taken by bird bloggers like Stuart Price at Hakodate Birding, I have increasingly realised that digiscoping cannot achieve the same high standards as through dSLR photography.

Lately, this has discouraged me from spending a lot of time over digiscoping birds.

2. Limitations of digiscoping.
During a shorebird trip to Chilaw last month, we encountered a Brown Noddy, a rare seabird that visits the Sri Lankan coasts in bad weather. It was flying low over the rough seas, quite close to the shore. I would have loved to have got a record shot of this rarity; however, such constantly moving subjects are nearly impossible to capture crisply through digiscoping for noodys like us. This explains why I have got no flight shots of birds on this blog.

But take a look at what Stu has achieved below of a bird in flight.


Plate 7. Eatern Curlew Numenius madagascariensis in flight by Stuart Price.

I seriously doubt any digiscoper can match the sharpness of a bird in flight like that. Or for that matter, stills like this .

3. Enjoying bird watching in its purest sense and not bothering to blog about it.

Since getting my Swarovski ELs (Salgado, 2009a), I think have become more of a watcher than a shooter in my birding habits (which I deem as healthy for me as a birder)
.
Gallicissa is not a photo blog sensu stricto. However, I do like to associate a photo or two with my posts, which explains why there is hardly any text-only posts in this blog. For some reason, I do not feel like doing text-only blog posts. So, with no new bird images at hand, my bird blogging has suffered a considerable setback over the past year or so. Perhaps my attitude towards doing text-only blog posts may change in the future as I mature as a writer, say as Rhythmic Diaspora who hardly includes images in his posts, but simply uses his spellbinding prose and sheer class to create vivid mental images.

Treatment.
Pre-clinial evaluaions have shown the Canon EF 100-400mm Lens (Plate 8) to be a very effective remedy to curb APOBPS. However, with a price tag of over $1,650 $1,700 this treatment remains quite steep. However, as things stand, it may be the only cure for the affected Sri Lankan blog in question, until future evaluations show otherwise.

Plate 8 Canon EF 100-400mm f4.5-5.6L IS USM Telephoto Zoom Lens.

Conclusion.
Early diagnosis, timely treatment and rigorous field birding may be the only cure for APOBPS positive bird blogs. With proper care they can bounce back to normalcy, of course leaving room for the odd non-birding post or two. Or three.

Acknowledgements.
I would like to thank Stu for lending his image and for his continuous encouragement to seek treatment. As always I am very thankful for all the readers and commenters. Normal service will resume very soon.

References.
Bergin, M., Moores, C. and Finger, C. (2007) About 10000 Birds. 10,000birds.com.
Ciccione, C. (2009a) Twelve-spotted Skipper. Picus Blog Aug, 2009.
Ciccione, C. (2009b) Wordless Wednesday. Picus Blog Sep, 2009.
Goodale, E., Salgado, A., and Kotagama, S.W. (2008). Birds of a different feather. Natural History 117:24-28.
Lord, M. (2007) Pioneers of Asian Ornithology: Colonel W. Vincent Legge. BirdingASIA 8: 84-89.
Poh, L. (1999) What is Digiscoping? Laurence Poh Digiscoping.
Redzlan, A. R. (2009) Belalang kunyit and sky. Tabib's Bird Blog Sep, 2009.
Ritschard, M and Schweizer, M. (2007) Identification of Asian Glaucidium owlets. BirdingAsia 7:39-47.
Salgado, A. (2006) Some observations on the diet of Red-faced Malkoha Phaenicophaeus pyrrhocephalus in Sri Lanka. Forktail 22:122-123.
Salgado, A. (2007) What is a Bird Blog? Gallicissa. In a comment somewhere, 2007
Salgado, A. (2009a) What is your binocular? Gallicissa Apr, 2009.
Salgado, A. (2009b) Macro Monday Gallicissa July, 2009.
Salgado, A. (2009c) Dragons in my garden Part 3 Gallcissa Aug, 2009

Citation: Salgado, A. (2009) Description of Acute Paucity of Bird Posts Syndrome (APOBPS), its diagnosis, treatment and stuff like that in relation to a bird blog in Sri Lanka. Gallicissa, September 2009.

You know you are a birding fanatic when you

keep a bathroom bird list complete with scientific names in taxonomic order.

know some of the birds outside your country by their scientific name.

get asked about various birds first by your doctor.

visit a rain forest in a tuktuk spending 4 hours on the road to see a single bird. Twice.

feel it is perfectly okay to ask your friendly public bus driver to drive a bit slowly when going pass your favourite roadside wetland patch.

have no problem whatsoever to sit on the rain forest floor to see a ground bird that is coloured like decaying leaf litter.

always make comfort stops on jungle trails, strategically near fruiting trees.

have been bitten in all vital parts of the body by leeches while birding except in the eyes.

have no issues in standing near a stinking sewage canal with all forms of vicious biting things hovering around you to see a drab bird that doesn’t even sing.

carry your binoculars, checklists and field guides to bars & restaurants at dinner time during bird tours and feel perfectly okay about it.

are inordinately fond of garbage dumps to look for rarities.

keep a list of birds seen in your dreams.

have spent a better part of your life looking like this:

...and like this:

always prefer to buy clothes that are green, brown, grey and birdie.

have named your blog after a mythical bird that you have made up, which not many people can understand or pronounce properly.

feel like it is your duty to comment in blogs of non-birders who cannot tell a coot from a duck, whenever they post about birds.

wake up at 3.45 a.m., leave the hotel at 4.15 a.m. and reach a cold and dreary spot before crack of dawn to see a dark bird that mostly reveal in silhouette.

go on bird trips using public transport wearing binoculars, gum boots and leech socks. Oh, and a hands-free umbrella.

have nicknames and pet names from school days that are bird-related.

bump into a female bird watcher and check out her pair of binoculars first.

Okay, I may I have stretched things a wee bit here and there. But these remain largely true.

Let’s hear your contributions.