Montagu's Harrier

[Dipankar Mazumdar]

Dear All,
Female Montagu's harrier from the grasslands of the Black buck sanctuary, Tal Chaper, Rajasthan. This is from the communal roosting area in the center of the park.

EOS 50D + 300f4 + 1.4xII @ f9, 1/640, ISO 400

Look forward to comments.

Cheers
Dipankar

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Nice eye contact. The depth of field is fine. May be slightly more space at the bottom would have been even better. How many of these did you find? Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

[Rajeev Khanna]

amazing clarity did u use a tripod for this image

[Mrudul Godbole]

Lovely eye contact. The catch light looks nice. Good details. Thanks for sharing.

[Supreet Sahoo]

Harriers are some of my favorite raptors and you have done really well to capture this. I feel that reducing some space from top and adding some from bottom would make it more appealing. You have got really good details on the bird and the eye contact is good. Were you on foot while shooting this? Are the birds easier to approach in Tal Chappar cos you seem to have made it really close. Good stuff overall.

Tfs
Supreet

[Murugan Anantharaman]

Lovely crisp image of the harrier. The eye contact is nice and the habitat captured is neat. If the blade of dry grass wasnt present in front of its legs maybe the claws would have been visible. Thanks for sharing.

[Bibhav Behera]

Lovely one Dipankar. I like the details in the eye. Agree about a tad more space at the bottom. But I see some Out of Focus grass in the foreground, which in that case would have become more pronounced. Thanks for sharing.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

I think people reading this would be having some confusion about the talk of space at the bottom. I meant just a little bit space at the bottom (for example about 50% more space than what is available between digits and frame edge).

I guess you were on a car and were clicking this. For more space at the bottom, one has to point or angle the camera further downwards and it will not appear great. I think the intention for this composition was to show a low angle. So I would not give a lot of space at the bottom.

Rather than space what bothers me more is the out of focus grass infront of the tail feather. Overall, I like this image.

[Dipankar Mazumdar]

Dear all,
Thankyou for your interest in this image, here is little bit of a background.

This image was shot from the window of a Maruti 800, belonging to the ACF, Shri S. S. Poonia who had kindly loaned his car to us to visit the sanctuary. This had twin advantages, a) The birds are used to seeing this car and they allow a reasonable close approach, you can gauge this by the fact that this is almost full frame with my 300f4+ 1.4x combination. b) I realized that the window level of a Maruti 800 is incredibly low..!!

I did take a few images pointing the lens lower to get a little more of the foreground but the this image seemed better than that. Ideally i would have loved to open the door of the car and step out like i did here, Steppe Eagle.. - Indiawilds: Land of the Tiger. Conservation, Wildlife Photography, Communities . But that being a steppe is much more bolder than the harrier. With the slightest attempt to unlatch the door, the harrier would have flown away at the sound of the door opening. In fact i was advised to take the camera lens out of the window, in a manner that one would do while taking pictures, much before reaching shooting range so that there would be no movements to disturb the Bird.

Unfortunately I did not have my beanbag in this particular instance but i used the window as a rest for the image.

Yes the grass on the foreground is a bit of a distraction, would have loved to not have that but usually at roosting time, the harriers land near a clump of grass and gradually move into it to provide cover for the night from lurking predators so grass in the immediate environment is a little difficult to avoid.

Taal Chaper is similar to the more famous Velavdar Blackbuck sanctuary but much smaller. The park has transformed itself in the last 6 years largely due to the efforts of Mr. Poonia who virtually uprooted every bit of prosopis from this park and replaced it with grasses creating a favourable habitat for the Blackbuck and for raptors such as Eagles, Vultures, Harriers and also other species such as the Demoisille Cranes, Common cranes, Yellow eyed Pigeons, Spanish sparrows, Pale rock Sparrow, water pipit, Buff bellied pipit to name a few. The overall bird count for this very small area stands at 303 species. In fact the critically endangered Great Indian Bustard has also been sighted here and it is hoped that a breeding pair takes up permanent residence here.
Amongst mammals, Blackbucks, Chinkara Neelgai, desert cat and fox, indian fox, jackals, Wild boar are regularly seen here.

For people based in Delhi, this is a "very easy to make a weekend dash" destination, a saturday sunday spend in Tal Chaper in the period from November to March is very productive both from birding and Photography perspective for species from the dry grasslands.



Cheers
Dipankar