Anyway, I put together another edition of I and the Bird this week, one focusing on vultures both Old and New World. Check it out.

Sanjay Gandhi has several species of monkeys running about, some more tolerant of people than others apparently. Walking back to the entrance I found myself in the middle of a troop of Rhesus Macaques walking leisurely along the river. I was taken aback, but this must have been a pretty common occurrence as none of the other, apparently local, walkers seemed to give a second look. The big male of the group sat along a rock wall, posing in that very simian way that makes them look like they’re so wise and content when really  they’re just waiting for someone to drop some food. not a single person stopped to look, likely as this was hardly a unique thing to people in Mumbai, but I stopped to photograph and all at once felt entirely foreign. Not only because I was the only white guy in the park (and the only white guy I had seen since I left the airport), but I was the only one with a few thousand dollars worth of optical equipment trained at the fairly normal sight of a monkey sitting on a wall.

I’ll say this about India. I never once felt like I was in any sort of danger. But as someone who likes to blend into the crowd wherever I go, this was a jarring experience. So when I put my camera up to my eye such that I couldn’t see anything except what was through the viewfinder, I felt incredibly exposed and claustrophobic. Indians are generally friendly, but they are very curious and don’t care much for the personal space like we may take for granted in America or Europe. I had already seen one to many pointed fingers and poorly muffled giggles from passer-by. I imagine this is what anyone of color feels like when birding in the US, but with the added complication of not understanding a single work anyone was saying.

I realize that this was mostly me dealing with my own stuff, but it’s remains one of the oddest experiences I’ve ever had in the field.

In any case, a small tribe of what I later realized were Bonnet Macaques (note the crown of dark hair on their heads and little different face) began getting into it on the other side of the pathway. I turned and fired off a few shots of this monkey fight.

People began to gather, I walked on.  My clock was urging me onward anyway and I had a plane to catch back home. Where there are no monkeys.

I had been traveling with a Portuguese/English travel writer, and not being a birder he was willing to sit by and watch my suitcase while I took off for a few hours to nearby Sanjay Gandhi National Park in the hopes of seeing something, anything, other than the Rock Pigeons and House Sparrows that make Mumbai no different than any other major city in the entire world. This changed everything.

I grabbed a cab, who almost certainly ripped me off, and headed north along the main thoroughfare towards the park. Driving in Mumbai is an experience unto itself. The same highway on which massive semi trucks barrel across the potholed surface also hosts cyclists putzing along in the middle of the road. There are no lanes, only right of ways shared by everybody. It is hair-raising to be sure, but enough that all you can really do is sit back and enjoy it, and my driver delivered me to the entrance of the park for only about $5 so I couldn’t complain. It’s India, if you worry too much you’re sunk.

I had done a bare minimum of research on the park before I left for the airport. Learning little more than the fact that the park has the highest concentrations of tigers in the nation. It’s an odd thing to be birding in a place where there is a very real, if exceptionally distant, chance of being eaten by an alpha predator. Fortunately, the entry way to the park was packed with people, like almost every part of India is, and there were no big cats, and exceptionally few birds but for the Oriental Magpie-Robins that hopped around a garden.

Without any sort of map or guidance, I sort of wandered the main paths looking for any sort of movement. An odd sound caught my ear and I paused to seek it out to find a gorgeous Coppersmith Barbet perched motionless on a almost bare tree. As this was one of my targets, I was pretty stoked.

The birds were pretty quiet around the masses of humanity, so it was with some trepidation that I wandered up a dry creek bed deep into tiger country in search of anything else. A flowering tree with huge orange blossoms attracted a nice variety of birds including Greater Coucal, Asian Koel, and Indian Jungle Crows with their enormous bills and deep voices. Good stuff.

Some smaller birds turned out to be Chestnut-tailed Starlings, a total brain bird. Until now I had managed pretty well identifying Indian species. Nothing had completely thrown me given the research I’d done beforehand. This odd species floored me, however, though I was able to guess at the family. They’re smaller than the Euro Starlings, though the shape was familiar.

A troop of Rhesus Macaques escorted me down the path as I returned to the entrance to catch a cab back (worth a blog post in their own right). The locals undoubtedly thought I was something of a nutjob as I paused to photograph them. A single Little Cormorant perched over the pond on my way back, the best opportunity I’d had to photograph one since I’d been there and a good enough last bird of the trip, if you don’t count the Rock Pigeons at the airport, and why would you?

I took an open air jitney back to the airport, a truly Indian experience, and made it back to the airport dusty and exhausted, but with a better sense of the country that I was going to be leaving. There’s truly no place like it, the modernity and the poverty crammed so abruptly against each other. I hope I get to come back some time, I remain insufficiently overwhelmed.

Indian Robin. Not a thrush.

There’s all this and more at the most recent I and the Bird. Up now at 10,000 Birds.

As the story goes, the local prince of the area now called Gujarat brought the trees over from Africa 400 years ago to slow the expansion of the desert. It worked, more or less. Now they’re everywhere, a monoculture that makes any of the dense thickets impossible for anything other than camels to move through. The locals put it to good use though, instead of barbed wire, livestock are placed in corrals made by stacking the prickly limbs of the tree. Inside these corrals the shrubs are grazed clean, making the interior more like the native tussocky scrub you find elsewhere but more protected from the elements. It’s not much of a surprise that the skulky birds like this sort of microhabitat. We heard francolins, both Black and Gray, crowing from these openings, even catching a glimpse of the second species. But the most exciting find was a trio of Chestnut-bellied Sandgrouse tucked in behind a sand hill and nearly invisible.

We watched as they slowly realized we were there and crept away towards a pile of thorny scrub, but they were in no danger from us separated from us by a five foot tall fence of limbs featuring thorns three inches long. Mad tree, indeed.

In this formidable thickets we’d find lots of Common Babblers, the second species of babbler for the trip following the Jungle Babblers in center city Ahmedebad. This was a family completely foreign to me, being only present in the Old World. They behave something like towhees, but with songs reminiscent of a melodious Winter Wren. And more, they travel in large flocks of up to a dozen, which is disconcerting for such a large bird.

I was intimidated by Old World warblers going into this trip, having had practically no experience with them aside from an apparent Willow Warbler from Great Britain when I was 15. I can say now that I was completely right to be scared of them. They are every bit as difficult as advertised, and made even worse by the fact that they’re distribution in this part of the world is far from settled. The most common species we came across in the vicinity of the Tent City was Syke’s Warbler, which used to be conspecific with Booted Warbler but hell if I know how to tell them apart. I went with range as the determining fact, but sweet fancy jesus these birds are tough.

The British birders I was hanging around with had a little better sense of what to look for here. Apparently the legs and the primary extension are important. I am not used to looking closely at the legs of anything in North America save gulls. That’s my own failure as a birder, I guess, but it also sort of explains why the average British birder is probably more skilled than the average North American birder.

Red-wattled Lapwings are colorful, loud, and extremely common. Fortunately, one never really tires of looking at them.

More on India to come. I’m still working my way through it!

The Lesser Antilles are then, as you can imagine, the smaller volcanic islands that run in an arc from Puerto Rico to the northern part of South America including the tiny nations of Grenada, Barbados, and Saint Vincent and its many Genadines, among others. That leaves the tree deserty, wind-blown islands of Aruba, Curacao, and Bonaire as the remaining Netherlands Antilles.

There is no test and please don’t feel bad for not knowing all this. I had not given the West Indies a whole lot of thought beyond their role as a Florida vagrant factory until I was looking at coming here. But having spent a few days on what is arguably the worst West Indian island for birding, even I can see the appeal of the nature down here and it has me wanting to see more. But what else is new?

Anyway, Tuesday morning was my planned day for real birding. I had contacted a local through the Birdingpals website. I’d never used it before as a traveler. My own name is listed among many other North Carolina birders and even so I’ve been contacted for information on places to go, though I’ve never taken anyone out and around because of it. Aruba, however, has only one name and not expecting much I emailed her asking only for some info on where to have a nice morning in the field and ended up spending the entire first half of the day with Olinda Rasmijn, Aruban native and apparently the nature lady on the island.

She didn’t use binoculars, so I have to say I didn’t know quite what to expect. But what she did know was where the birds were. And our first stop, a ephemeral salt pan not more than 150 meters north of our hotel, turned out to be amazing, highlighted by a quarter of American Flamingos.

I don’t know the status of flamingos down here, but I they looked wild enough for me. It was about here that I realized that my copy of Bart De Boer’s Birds of Aruba, Curacao, & Bonaire was going to be an issue. I’d received a review copy some time ago but had decided not to review it as I found it significantly wanting. The illustrations are absolutely terrible, but in trying to use it here I realized that the information on the opposite side of the page was completely wrong too. Roseate Spoonbills, of which I was looking at no fewer than five individuals, were listed as a “rare visitor from South America”. I asked Olina if this was a good birds and she just said, “They’re always here”. Well, then.

As it turned out in conversations with Jeff Wells of the excellent Birds of Aruba website, who keeps excellent records of the island’s birdlife, De Boer had not even asked him for advice. An oversight to be sure.

Aaaanyway. Our morning was spent out and about at several of the hotspots on the western side of this tiny island. We saw Caribbean Coots and White-cheeked Pintails and loads of wading birds. I caught a couple glimpses of Venezuelen Troupial, an impossibly large oriole with a shocking patch of bare blue skin around the eye. No photos, but I will not leave this island without on.  I finally got a good photo of one of the amazingly blue Aruban Whiptails, one of the island’s endemic reptiles.

Best bird of the day was arguably the incredibly cute Burrowing Owl Olinda showed us at Spanish Lagoon on the south coast of the island. He popped up on the other side of a hill and stayed stock still as I came around on him. I took a few photos, then stepped away, as it kept its eyes on me the whole time. These guys are the national bird of Aruba, even though there aren’t that many of them around anymore.

After a whole morning in the field, eBird puts me as the top birder on Aruba for 2013, which means I should probably just go for the big year. I’m unlikely to get more than a handful of species more, though who knows what I could turn up this early in migration. I’m at 53 species for the trip, which is 3 more than I expected. not a bad haul. On to the record!