Greater Flameback

While planning our trip to Eravikulam National Park, my wife and I were invited to stay at one of her relatives' farm house. It was a quite place, not far from Munnar town. This beautiful house was constructed on top of a small hill. The plan was to stay there for 3~4 days. But then a sudden heavy rain robbed our trip off a couple of days. When we finally reached, I noticed the damaged window frames of this relatively new house. The estate manager gave an explanation, a resident woodpecker caused the mischief. Woodpeckers could be territorial. In this case, offended by its own reflection on the window panes, it would drum the wooden frame vigorously for hours in an effort to beat its "rival". He then revealed his earlier plan of electrocuting this beautiful bird. However my wife's uncle, the owner of the farmhouse and a conservator himself, never approved that idea.

Watching those windows, I assumed the bird used to land on the middle horizontal wooden frame and worked upward in typical woodpecker style. It was intriguing that this bird chiseled only on the right side vertical frames!!

Even though I could not think of any safe *solution to discourage the bird, the prospect of watching it so close was exciting. We quickly finished our breakfast and waited inside the room. Around half an hour later this bird came landing on this damp coconut tree just outside the window. Hiding behind the curtain, I opened one of the windows quietly to take this picture.




100-300mm lens at 100mm
f5.6 for 1/125 sec
ISO 400

*further reading
http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/library/wldlf2/L866.pdf