Black Bittern

Noah Strycker, who set the world record for number of bird species seen in a year, visited Keoladeo NP on September 25, 2015, Day 268 of his record-setting 2015 birding year. In his daily column for that day, in Audubon magazine, he noted that he only saw five new birds on his partial day at Keoladeo, but one included the black bittern and he included a photo. 

Bitterns are notoriously difficult to find. I've only seen two bitterns in the past and both were when I was with guides. The first, an American bittern (post on February 6, 2018), was while I was on a flat-bottomed swamp boat ride in the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia; and the second, a little bittern (post on August 3, 2022), was with a professional guide in the Sado Estuary near Lisbon, Portugal.  So reading about Strycker's black bittern find retained a place in my memory as we prepared to visit Keoladeo NP on our recent visit to India. 

We got to Keoladeo NP about 3:00 p.m. I'd really had to fight to get there that day. First, our travel planner at Audley Travel, didn't think we could fly from Kathmandu into Delhi, go through customs, then drive from Delhi to Bhuratpur in time to spend any time there. So he didn't plan any activities for us. I thought we could. So he quoted $300 as an add-on for all of us to visit Keoladeo that afternoon if we insisted on it. I offered to pay the $300 as no one else really cared about the birding and didn't want to fork over $50 per person for an activity that may not happen. Second, we got to Delhi early and got through customs very early (about 9:30 a.m.), about 45 minutes quicker than the itinerary called for (10:15 a.m.). We got in our 9 person Force Urbania van with a driver that could barely speak English and started for Bhuratpur. Third, as we were driving my brother-in-law, Stan, whispered to me that we were only going 80 kph (about 48 mph) while the speed limit for buses was 100 kph and the speed limit for other traffic was 120 kph. I reached up to the driver, from a seat behind him, holding 1,500 Rupees (about $18) and said he could have it if he would go 95 kph. He grabbed the Rupees out of my hand, folded them up and put it them in his pocket. He then pointed to a sticker on the windshield that said the van speed was limited to 80 kph (I'm guessing that is an Audley safety requirement). Our driver bumped the speed up, just slightly, to 85 kph, but would not go any faster. I input our route onto Apple Maps on my iPhone and was horrified to watch us continuing to lose time to our projected arrival. I mentioned to our driver, once or twice, that I'd paid him to go faster, but he kept pointing to the sticker in the window. However, once we got off the equivalent of the Indian freeway and onto local roads, the driver pretty much kept up the pace with Apple Maps, getting quite aggressive about passing slower vehicles. So I felt okay about giving him the Rupees - he was trying. Fourth, I asked the driver if he would drop us three men (who wanted to do the birding) at Keoladeo NP first before taking the women to our hotel. The driver agreed and that saved us about an hour. We got to Keoladeo about two hours before it got too dark at 5:00 p.m. and closed. 

At Keoladeo we shared a motorized rickshaw (they'd switched to motorized from pedal-powered two years previous) with a driver upfront, our guide and the three of us in the back, two facing backward and two facing forward. We drove to a walking path into a swamp and our guide walked very slowly and spent most of the time with the other two men, Stan and Dave, setting up his scope to show them birds while I walked ahead scanning for new birds. At this rate I was not going to see many new birds and I really wanted our guide's expertise. So when we finished that afternoon I sat down with him and offered an incentive to him to be more aggressive in finding new birds for me the next morning when we had our whole group of six. I handed him 1,500 Rupees, over and above the tip we jointly gave him for our time that day, and then offered to pay him 300 Rupees (a little over $3) per each new bird that was a lifer for me (a bird I'd never seen before). He started thinking and then asked, "have you seen a black bittern before (I immediately thought of Noah Strycker)?, a dusky eagle-owl?, a night jar?," and he named several other birds he obviously knew the locations of that he could lead us to. This was perfect, it was exactly what I'd hoped for. 

We got to Keoladeo the next morning and I was horrified to see that we were all going in two motorized rickshaws with only the one guide. When we planned the trip with Audley, based on what I'd read, I thought we would each be in a pedal rickshaw with the pedaler acting as our guide and we would each be on our own. This was shaping up to be a disaster for my desire to see as many birds as possible. But our guide, who'd been working at Keoladeo for ten years, was incredible. He kept us moving along, with him and the men in the lead rickshaw and the women in a rickshaw behind us. Our guide would spot a bird, set up his scope for all to peer into, then scour around and look for new birds for me and motion for me to come over to him. 

I was not surprised at all when we took a walk along a road/dike between large swampy areas and he walked over to a patch of thick reeds and then asked me for my camera. He quietly peeked into the reeds, took a couple of photos, then motioned us to look in. It was a black bittern that flushed pretty quickly. I thought of Noah Strycker again, and knew that this was one of those secret spots that only the initiated know about. You rarely just stumble across a bittern. I was very happy. I was not surprised a few minutes later, again, when we just happened to spot a dusky eagle-owl standing on a distant tree, the second bird he'd asked me about the night before. We were tapping into his ten years of familiarity with Keoladeo. 

The black bittern has a broad buffy stripe on the side of the neck and black, rufous and buff streaking on elongated feathers on the neck. The male is dark grayish black and the female is more dark brown. 

The photo taken by our guide. I love how the feather colors on the neck and chest mirror the colors on the ground next to it. I believe it is a female. 

Illustration of a female black bittern from Birds of the World. 

Range map from Birds of the World. I'm surprised by how little of India the black bittern is found in and the map does not appear to go as far south as Keoladeo NP. 

I was probably as excited about this sighting as any other bird we saw on our trip to India. Bitterns are not easy to find and I felt connected a bit to Noah Strycker on my own much more limited quest to see new birds.   

Bengal Tiger - Siddhi

I have always loved animals and in my life I have had a succession of wishes that have been fulfilled in magical ways. My desire to see: mountain goats was fulfilled in August 1996 when my brother-in-law, Dave Kenison, and I walked into a herd of mountain goats on Mt. Timpanogos outside Provo, Utah (April 20, 2009); moose was fulfilled in August 1996 when my brother, Matt, and I encountered bull, cow and calf moose on a backpacking trip in Henry's Basin of the Uinta Mountains in Utah (June 16, 2009); gila monster was fulfilled in March 2008 when with my ward scout troop in Alamo Canyon in Organ Pipe Cactus NM in Arizona (June 7, 2009); alligator was fulfilled in June 2004 on a family vacation in several places in Louisiana (October 25, 2009); macaw was fulfilled in February 2009 when Judy and I and my law partners visited Tambota NR in Peru (June 21, 2021); rutting bighorn sheep was fulfilled October 2016 when my son, Sam, and I encountered head-banging bighorn sheep near the Columbia River and Rocky Reach Dam in Washington state (October 18, 2016);  grizzly bear was fulfilled in July 2016 when my wife, Judy, and I encountered two grizzly bears on a bus ride in Denali NP in Alaska (August 17, 2016); caribou was fulfilled on the same bus ride in Denali NP (August 19, 2016); brown bear was fulfilled in July 2016 when Judy and I encountered a mother brown bear and two cubs after a flight on a float plane to Chichagof Island in southeastern Alaska (August 21, 2016); black bear was fulfilled in July 2016 when Judy and I encountered multiple black bears, including one with cubs, after a flight on a float plane to Anan Creek across from Wrangell Island in southeastern Alaska (September 4, 2016); to visit the wonderful animal kingdom of Africa (and see a plethora of African animals) was fulfilled in May 2014 when Judy, my law partners and I visited Africa for safaris in Kenya and Tanzania (Souvenir Chronicles June 18, 2014), and in particular to see an elephant (July 24, 2014), a lion (July 9, 2014), a cheetah (August 14, 2014), a leopard (August 28, 2014), a giraffe (August 11, 2014), a rhino (September 13, 2014), a hippo (July 6, 2014), a zebra (August 24, 2014), a crocodile (July 11, 2014), an ostrich (June 30, 2014) and a secretarybird (June 24, 2014); wild dog was fulfilled in June 2018 when Judy and I visited the Okavanga Delta of Botswana (August 5, 2018); toucan was fulfilled in June 2022 when I visited Milpe Bird Sanctuary outside Mindo, Ecuador (May 24, 2022); to visit the Darwin animal oddities of the Galapagos Islands was fulfilled in March 2022 (November 13, 2022), and in particular to see the marine iguana (April 15, 2022) and Galapagos tortoise (April 14, 2022); to visit the remote and frozen landscape of Greenland was fulfilled in June 2019 when Judy and I visited Ilulissat and Kangerlussuaq with my law partners (July 9, 2019 and Souvenir Chronicles July 2, 2019); to visit the exotic animal islands of Sumatra (August 7, 2023) and Borneo (September 5, 2023) and in particular to see orangutans, was fulfilled in July 2023 when Judy and I saw Sumatran orangutans (August 20, 2023) and Bornean orangutans (August 26, 2023); and komodo dragons was fulfilled in July 2023 when Judy and I visited the Indonesian Islands of Rinca (July 27, 2023) and Komodo (July 30, 2023). 

One wish, really a dream, has been to see a tiger. Visiting India seemed like a pipe dream as a little boy, much more so than even Africa. However, in December 2024, after much planning, we visited India and included five days in Kaziranga NP which included six game drives. I did a lot of research on where to see tigers in India. Kaziranga had the highest density of tigers per square kilometer in the world (118 within the boundary) and also offered lots of other wildlife at the same time, including the world's largest population of one-horned rhinos and wild water buffalo and the highest density of Indian elephants per kilometer. It was an Important Bird Area and 594 species of birds have been seen there. It was all of that. I loved Kaziranga, but unfortunately did not see a tiger, although we came up on a vehicle in front of us that had just seen one cross the road in front of them. In applying for an e-Visa to India I spent a little more money to get a five year Visa, instead of a 30 day Visa, just in case we needed to go back to see a tiger.  

Much to Judy's chagrin, we needed the five year Visa as I started planning another trip to India for November 2025 with the main purpose of seeing a tiger. While we finished the remainder of our first trip to India I asked our guides about best places to see a tiger. After getting back home I did more internet research and I finally settled on Ranthambore NP.  My initial plan was to do seven game drives, but I started to get a little pushback from some others in our group and scaled it back to five, believing  from what I'd read that we should be able to see a tiger with that many game drives. 

Ranthambore has ten zones and the best zones for seeing tigers are zones 1 through 5. You can't choose the zones you want to visit in Ranthambore and you can't choose your guide or vehicle, something I really don't like and didn't understand when we planned our trip through Audley. You  submit a request by August and then get assigned to zone, guide and vehicle by the park. You can get a six passenger jeep or a canter which holds twenty passengers. Because there were six of us, we were able to "buy" the whole jeep for ourselves and not be randomly assigned to a vehicle. I looked at what it would cost to have just two passengers in a jeep and it was prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, we got assigned zones one, two, four and five (twice), all good tiger zones. 

We did zone 3 our first morning, a Thursday (we had zone 2, but it was closed because of road damage and all zone 2's got assigned to zone 3 which had lots of safari traffic), and zone 5 in the afternoon. No tigers. We had zone 5 Friday morning and saw no tigers. We were all pretty discouraged by this time. We had come with high hopes and the hope was fading. So four of our group decided to skip the afternoon safari and visit Ranthambore Fort instead. I was determined to give maximum effort in my tiger quest and did the afternoon safari with my brother-in-law, Stan, in zone 1. Our guide mentioned that summer is the best time to see tigers in Ranthambore because it gets so hot (over 100, 110 degrees) that the water sources dry up and the tigers are forced to go to the water. I recalled our two travel planners at Audley who had both seen tigers at Ranthambore and described it being extremely hot and sweating profusely, and had an aha moment. We were there when the climate was perfect for us, but not for seeing tigers. We spent an hour or an hour and a half just sitting in the jeep, waiting. Deer were barking warning calls and we were on high alert for a tiger. It got very boring and I was wishing to see lots of birds, which were nothing like in Kaziranga. However, we finally saw a tiger at the end of our drive, a story for another day. Stan and I had lots of time to talk to our guide and we learned that he'd been guiding in Ranthambore since 1994. He said he'd seen it all. I had previously determined he did not know what he was talking about, but he gained credibility when I learned how long he'd been doing it and after we saw the tiger. 

Saturday morning, our final game drive, we had our full contingent of six. We were back in zone 5, which we'd visited previously, and was my favorite of the zones we'd visited. Lots of water and beautiful scenery. We got quite close to the end of the zone when our guide received indications from other drivers of deer barking warning signs. Unlike the long delay we experienced the day before, we pretty quickly ran into a road packed with vehicles and within minutes passengers in vehicles ahead of us were excitedly pointing to a tiger. Hope in our vehicle surged and our guide starting jibbering loudly and quickly in Hindi when the tiger appeared to us, walking across a river bed. 

The tiger disappeared into tall grass and our driver sped ahead, passing other vehicles and stopping at a spot where he figured the tiger would reappear. It did, but we got unclear views. 

We sped ahead, passing more vehicles, crossing a ravine and bouncing around like we were in a bounce house. The driver was possessed. We saw the tiger again and I was trying to get more photos when the driver sped off the road, up and over a berm, going over rocks and the berm again, in between vehicles and positioned us beautifully for the tiger as it emerged right next to us for the best view we had of the tiger. I was unhappy with the driver, but have to admit he did a masterful job positioning us for our best photos. 

We sped ahead again and got our last glimpse of the tiger as it disappeared into the trees. 

There was more to this story, but things were so fast and frantic, and my edit of photos discarded many that I deemed not worth keeping. So there were more moves of the vehicle than I describe, but my edits and discarding of not-so-good photos, impacted the story time line for me.  

The mood in the vehicle was excited and joyous. The best was saved for the last. We headed for the exit with little care about what else we were seeing along the way. Judy was happy because it meant we did not have to come back to India to see a tiger. 

We learned that we had seen Siddhi, a nine year old tiger who normally resides in zones 3 and 4, the best tiger zones, which means she is the most dominant tiger in Ranthambore. She has two nine month old cubs, which we did not see. A third cub was killed by her sister and Siddhi and her sister had a terrible territorial fight. Siddhi's sister was moved to another national park. 

There are other unfulfilled wishes on my bucket list: mountain lion (I've seen one brief view in Redlands), jaguar, polar bear, musk ox, wolf (I've seen one brief view in Minnesota), wolverine, gorilla, chimpanzee, forest elephant, okapi, anaconda, cobra, walrus, snow leopard, Arctic penguin, capybara, platypus, Tasmanian devil and kangaroo, among others that did not come to mind when I thought about my wish list, which is not written down, just swimming around in my head. 

Orange-Crowned Warbler

I saw an orange-crowned warbler on July 28th of this year in the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles below the Buckhorn Campground which is on the Pacific Crest Trail near a beautiful stream. I was actually focusing on a dark-eyed junco which was nearby, but because it was behind some small limbs it wasn't focusing well. I noticed the warbler when it flew, but didn't know I had decent photos of it until I got home and was reviewing my photos. 

The orange-crowned warbler has olive-gray upperparts, yellowish underparts with faint streaking and a thin pointed bill. It has a faint line over each eye and a faint broken eye ring. The orange patch on the crown is not usually visible. Females and juveniles are duller than males. Western birds are yellower than eastern birds. They can be distinguished by lack of wing bars, streaking on the underparts, and strong face marking or bright coloring. There are four subspecies, but it is difficult to pinpoint which subspecies we have because ssp. sordida is resident in Southern California and northwestern Mexico and the others all winter in Mexico or Guatemala and could have been passing through. 

Two different subspecies, above and below.

Range from Birds of the World. Light blue is wintering, orange is breeding, yellow is migration and purple is year-round. 

Brown Creeper

Earlier this year I visited a woodpecker preserve in Nevada City, California and a bird I thought I might see there was the brown creeper, a bird I was not familiar with. I think it may have come to my attention because of my son Sam, who asked if I'd seen one before and he'd just been there. On the way back home from Nevada City I drove the Angeles Crest Highway and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail below Buckhorn Camp above a beautiful stream. There I saw a very camouflaged bird creeping along a tree and found out when I got home and looked at my photos that it was a brown creeper. Birds of the World says that its cryptic coloration and high-pitched vocalizations make it difficult to detect, but that it is widely distributed in forests throughout North America. 

The camouflage here is amazing. I could detect the movement, but had a hard time getting the outlines of the bird. 

 

Range from Birds of the World.

There are 13 subspecies and it appears I saw ssp. zelotes which is found in the mountains of southern Oregon, to northern, eastern and southern California. 

Range from Birds of the World. 

American Crocodile

I've seen a number of crocodile species now: (a) Morelet's crocodile in Villahermosa, Mexico (post on March 25, 2018); (b) the Nile crocodile in Masai Mara NR and Buffalo Springs NR in Kenya (post on July 11, 2014) and in the Okavanga Delta of Botswana (post on August 29, 2018); (c) West African crocodile in Kidepo Vallley NP in Uganda (post on December 5, 2025); and (d) the mugger crocodile in Udawalawe NP, Yala NP and Bundala NP in Sri Lanka (post on April 16, 2019). I did a post on the saltwater crocodile I thought I'd seen in Bundala NP in Sri Lanka (post on April 25, 2019), but my iNaturalist posts all eventually got to the point where they indicated they were mugger crocodile. This post on iNaturalist started out with 3 identifications as saltwater crocodile, followed by 8 identifications saying it was a mugger. 

I saw an American crocodile in the Panama Canal in Panama on March 17, 2022. It was at some distance and my photos only really show the head. 

American crocodile range from Wikipedia. Note that Florida is the only place in the U.S. that has them. 

I've seen signs for crocodiles in Florida, but not the crocodile. 

Surprisingly, it is one of the largest species of crocodile, reaching a length of 23 feet (averaging 9 feet, 6 inches to 13 feet, 5 inches) and a weight of 2,200 pounds (averaging about 880 pounds). However, it tends not to be as aggressive as some other species. 

Mountain Chickadee

Chickadees are small North American birds in the family Paridae. Related birds outside of North America are known as tits. The mountain chickadee is the sister (the closest living relative on the evolutionary tree) to the black-capped chickadee (post on November 8, 2022). The mountain chickadee has a black cap which is joined by a black postocular stripe behind white eyebrows. 

This photo of the back of a mountain chickadee shows how the black cap merges with the black ocular stripe and the white eyebrows. 

The black postocular stripe (which looks like it is also pre-ocular), the white eyebrows and the black cap, as well as a black bib. All other North American chickadees have a solid black cap. 

They have a short black bill, a black bib, the back and flanks are gray and they have pale gray underparts. 

The two photos above and this, and the next photo, were all taken near the Chilao visitor center in the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles. 

This photo, and the next two photos, were taken below the Buckhorn Campground in the San Gabriel Mountains. 

Illustration from Birds of the World.

Range from Birds of the World.

Note that the range shows them only in the mountains in Southern California but we have them come to our bird feeder in Redlands. See the photos below.