kharghar trail 6dec06

Julius and myself decided to visit Kharghar today. We reached Kharghar around 8 am but the weather was quite chill and foggy. This was the result of snowfall in the northern parts of the country where the temperatures dropped by 3 to 4 degrees.
However after 15/20 min it began to get warmer and out came our friends showing off. The light was perfect and had a good day out.

May be a pessimistic view but one more habitat which may go the developers way. . As soon as we entered we could see all the grass and shrubs burnt out. We were told that people just throw cigarette butts and ends up in a fire on these hills. But the patches of burnt areas bely this theory. On the way up we could see lot of patches of burnt grass.

We saw Indian robins feeding on the roasted insects and lot of green bee eaters, palm swift, dusky craig martins. However the great catch was the purple sunbird feeding on milk weed.The Iora was posing away to glory.

There were lot of raptors. probably peregrine falcon, oriental honey buzzard. However posting these pics and would be glad if our expert birders could identify the same. May be this is a quiz for us at Navi Mumbai and how good are we at identifying raptors.

All the best .