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A day out into the wilderness of The Western Ghats
On the Skippers , a Rice Swift made an entry and exited while a South Indian Ace spent lot of time probing the floor . Three significant observations have to happen here one by one after this .
The Three-spot Grass Yellows were tightly mud-puddling and a Common Gull was somehow able to penetrate the defence and get along with them too . Suddenly a fast flying Pierid came and was trying to join the party . I soon realised it is a Lesser Gull , a true forest species , not seen that often and in good numbers . A White-tipped Lineblue was also present and it is really sad that we could not take a better picture in the field of the same . All along the trek , we saw Orchids were present in many tall trees and I was mentioning that we should get Tits and if possible some Royals . Although , we could not get any Royals , we were extremely delighted to have two small blues , sighted under a shady area and another on a sunny area , both sucking mineral waters from the surface . What a delight it was for all of us , the Orchid Tit and a Nilgiri Tit . These sightings lifted the mood of everyone and soon the trip started acquiring a good sense . A suspected Common Sergeant too was sighted but no photography was possible .
It was another lengthy session of 90 minutes here and we were all hungry very seriously with just 2 slices of bread to have in the morning with a few fried snacks . We decided to end the session around 1 PM as rains were looming to come down . We have to eventually rush down once rain started falling . The only significant additions on our return was a Nilgiri Four-ring ( just a record shot ) and a Water Snow Flat ( not clear with pictures ). We have safely reached down and crossed the stream . This place , which comes under the Devadhanapatti Range is part of Kodaikanal WLS and the richness of the forest made us to compare with other good places we have visited like Manjolai and Siruvani Hills . We wish the richness of the forest is intact as this place has a huge potential to record 200 plus species . The pre-visit numbers stood at 120 and after this trip the numbers swelled to 131 . A lovely place which is worth coming back again and again . The exact description of the location visited is withheld to avoid over exploitation of this , otherwise well protected ( by the FD and kudos to them ) and beautiful landscape !
Team Visited : A Pavendhan , CV Nishanth , Andipatti Pandi , K Sravan Kumar and Ramanasaran Hari
PATTAMPOOCHI A TNBS MAGAZINE WINGS 2 VEINS 4
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