Catch

If you are in a right place at right time, then creating great photographs is pretty easy. But what about being wrong place at a right time? This was one such situation I faced. I found this juvenile Black Drongo (Dicrurus macrocercus) in the act of catching a moth and feasting on it.

Savoring Moments

Unfortunately the Drongo landed just right above my head on an electric wire. If I were to go slightly away and recompose the scene so that Drongo is at a comfortable natural position, I would have missed the moment. So I decided to photograph the best I could in that fading evening light. Lying in supine position on the ground I could capture this sequence of shots of Drongo feasting on the moth. I was using Canon EOS 7D with Canon EF 300mm f/2.8 L IS USM attached with Canon EF 1.4x II Extender.

Ooops it is flying off

Metering this Drongo in low evening light was tricky as the sky behind the bird was brighter. Camera meter will get fooled by the over all brightness of the sky as it averages to 18% grey. Thus Bird will be under exposed. So I gave + 2 stop exposure compensation so that the bird was exposed properly. This resulted in sky blowing out (white and over exposed).

Caught You!

Most animals are photographed best when they are at your eye level. Birds which perch high up in the trees are difficult to photograph this way. One of the method is to go far away from the subject at an angle and use large tele lenses so that it looks as though you are nearly at its eye level. If shot like what I did here, right below the bird then you end up with more of the abdomen of the bird than head and neck.

Finger Lickingly Good

Hope I will be in a right place at right time next time

Phintella versicolor

This jumping spider was photographed on a rainy day on the top of my car. The background what you see is the pearl white finish paint of the Maruti Suzuki Swift car. Rain droplets as well as the spiders eye reflect the light source which was my ExpoImaging Ray Flash Adapter which was mounted on Canon Speedlite 580EX II. I was Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM lens on Canon EOS 5D mark II. Thanks to Javed Jameer Ahmed of Spider India group, I was able to identify this spider as Jumping Spider belonging to the family Salticidae, genus Phintella species. Possibly Phintella versicolor.So far the species Phintella versicolor has not yet been reported from India. Phintella versicolor (C. L. Koch, 1846) is described from China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Sumatra, Hawai’i.

The jumping spider family (Salticidae) contains more than 500 described genera and about 5,000 described species, making it the largest family of spiders with about 13% of all species. Jumping spiders have good vision and use it for hunting and navigating. They are capable of jumping from place to place, secured by a silk tether. Both their book lungs and the tracheal system are well-developed, as they depend on both systems (bimodal breathing).

Phintella versicolor

Jumping spiders live in a variety of habitats. Tropical forests harbor the most species, but they are also found in temperate forests, scrub lands, deserts, intertidal zones, and even mountains. Euophrys omnisuperstes is a species reported to have been collected at the highest elevation, on the slopes of Mount Everest.

Jumping spiders are generally recognized by their eye pattern. All jumping spiders have four pairs of eyes with very large anterior median eyes. All jumping spiders have their eyes arranged in three rows, except for the Lyssomaninae, which have four rows (one for each pair).

Phintella versicolor

Jumping spiders are generally diurnal, active hunters. Their well-developed internal hydraulic system extends their limbs by altering the pressure of body fluid (hemolymph) within them. This enables the spiders to jump without having large muscular legs like a grasshopper. Most jumping spiders can jump several times the length of their body. When a jumping spider is moving from place to place, and especially just before it jumps, it tethers a filament of silk to whatever it is standing on. Should it fall for one reason or another, it climbs back up the silk tether.

Jumping spiders are scopula-bearing spiders, which means that they have a very interesting tarsal section. At the end of each leg they have hundreds of tiny hairs, which each then split into hundreds more tiny hairs, each tipped with an “end foot”. These thousands of tiny feet allow them to climb up and across virtually any terrain. They can even climb up glass by gripping onto the tiny imperfections, usually an impossible task for any spider.

Phintella versicolor

Jumping spiders are known for their curiosity. If approached by a human hand, instead of scuttling away to safety as most spiders do, the jumping spider will usually leap and turn to face the hand. Further approach may result in the spider jumping backwards while still eyeing the hand.

This behavior can be explained by the jumping spider’s reliance on vision. Unlike many spiders, which use their secondary eyes mainly for navigation, the jumping spider also uses its secondary eyes to detect nearby entities (many other spiders rely instead on hairs for proximity detection). Having ascertained the presence of a nearby entity, jumping spiders will turn to examine it with the more accurate anterior median eyes, with which they identify the interloper as prey, natural phenomenon, possible threat, or potential mate. This leads them to behave in a manner suggestive of curiosity: since they are highly visual creatures that use their anterior median eyes to assess objects of interest, they must, by necessity, bring anything of interest into their visual field.

Jumping spiders have very good vision centered in their anterior median eyes (AME). Their eyes are able to create a focused image on the retina, which has up to four layers of receptor cells in it (Harland & Jackson, 2000). Physiological experiments have shown that they may have up to four different kinds of receptor cells, with different absorption spectra, giving them the possibility of up to tetrachromatic color vision, with sensitivity extending into the ultraviolet range. It seems that all salticids, regardless of whether they have two, three, or four kinds of color receptors, are highly sensitive to UV light (Peaslee & Wilson, 1989). Some species (for example, Cosmophasis umbratica) are highly dimorphic in the UV spectrum, suggesting a role in sexual signaling. Color discrimination has been demonstrated in behavioral experiments.

Phintella versicolor

Jumping spiders are active hunters, which means that they do not rely on a web to catch their prey. Instead, these spiders stalk their prey. They use their superior eyesight to distinguish and track their intended meals, often for several inches. Then, they pounce, giving the insect little to no time to react before succumbing to the spider’s venom.

Although spiders are generally carnivorous, there are some jumping spiders which include nectar and pollen in their diet and one species, Bagheera kiplingi, which feeds primarily on plant matter. None are known to feed on seeds or fruit. Plants such as the partridge pea offer the jumping spiders nectar through extrafloral nectaries, and in return the spiders help to protect the plant by killing and eating pests.

Female Asian Koel

This female Asian Koel (Eudynamys scolopaceus) is a member of the cuckoo order of birds, the Cuculiformes. It is found in South Asia, China, and Southeast Asia. It forms a superspecies with the closely related Black-billed and Pacific Koels which are sometimes treated as subspecies. The Asian Koel is a brood parasite that lays its eggs in the nests of crows and other hosts, who raise its young. They are unusual among the cuckoos in being largely frugivorous as adults. The name koel is echoic in origin and the bird is a widely used symbol in Indian poetry.

The Asian Koel is a large, long-tailed, cuckoo at 45 cm. The male is glossy bluish-black, with a pale greenish grey bill, the iris is crimson, and it has grey legs and feet. The female is brownish on the crown and has rufous streaks on the head. The back, rump and wing coverts are dark brown with white and buff spots. The underparts are whitish, but is heavily striped.

They are very vocal during the breeding season (March to August in South Asia), with a range of different calls. The familiar song of the male is a repeated koo-Ooo. The female makes a shrill kik-kik-kik… call.

Female Asian Koel

The Asian Koel is a bird of light woodland and cultivation. It is a mainly resident breeder in tropical southern Asia from India and Sri Lanka to south China and the Greater Sundas. They have great potential in colonizing new areas, and were among the pioneer birds to colonize the volcanic island of Krakatau.

The Asian Koel is a brood parasite, and lays its single egg in the nests of a variety of birds, including the Jungle Crow, and House Crow. Males may distract the hosts so that the female gets a chance to lay an egg in the nest. More often however, the female visits the nest of the host alone. The chicks of the Koel hatched about 3 days ahead of the host chicks. Koels usually lay only an egg or two in a single nest but as many as seven to eleven eggs have been reported from some host nests. A female may remove a host egg before laying. Eggs hatch in 12 to 14 days. The young Koel does not always push out eggs or evict the host chicks, and initially calls like a crow. The young fledge in 20 to 28 days. Unlike as in some other cuckoos, the young do not attempt to kill the host chicks, a trait that is shared with the Channel-billed Cuckoos which are also largely frugivorous as adults. It has been suggested that Koels, like some other brood parasites do not evict the host chicks due presumably due to the higher cost of evicting nestmates. A small parasite may not be able to evict large host eggs or chicks from a deep Corvid nest without risking starvation and possibly accidental self-eviction.

The Asian Koel is omnivorous, consuming a variety of insects, caterpillars, eggs and small vertebrates. Adults feed mainly on fruit. They will sometimes defend fruiting trees that they forage in and chase away other frugivores. They have been noted to be especially important in the dispersal of the sandalwood tree (Santalum album) in India. Large seeded fruits are sometimes quickly regurgitated near the parent tree while small seeded fruits are ingested and are likely to be deposited at greater distances from the parent tree. They have a large gape and are capable of swallowing large fruits including the hard fruit of palms such as Arenga and Livistona.

The word “Koel” is derived from the Hindi word which is onomatopoeic in origin. The Sanskrit root is “Kokila” and the words in various Indian languages are similar. It is traditionally held in high regard for its song and held in reverence with the Manusmriti, an ancient decree protecting them from harm. These birds were once very popular in India as cagebirds. Feeding even on boiled rice, these hardy birds lived in captivity for as long as 14 years.

female Asian Koel

This bird has an strong association with the Traditional new year celebrations of Sri Lanka. In the literature around the festival, the song of the bird regarded as a heralding of the traditional new year. This bird is known as the koha in Sri Lanka by the Sinhala speaking community.

Courtesy: Wikipedia