Bluethroat

The bluethroat is part of the Old World flycatcher family. It breeds in wet birch wood or bushy swamp in Europe and across the Palearctic (across Europe and Asia north of the foothills of the Himalayas and North Africa) and western Alaska. It winters in the Iberian Peninsula, the northern half of Africa and southern Asia, including the Indian subcontinent. It is often called a chat. I saw this female bluethroat in Keoladeo NP in India.

It is plain brown above, except for the tail that has black outer corners and red basal side patches. It has a white supercilium and males have a throat pattern with a glossy blue throat bordered with a narrow black band and a broad red band below that. There is often a central spot, either red or white, in the middle of the blue throat. There are either seven (Shirihai) or eleven (IOC) subspecies that differ in the extent and intensity of the blue on the throat in the males and whether the blue has a central spot, or not, and if it does, the color of the spot. The nominate subspecies Luscinia svecica svecica, the one I saw in Keoladeo NP in India, is known as the red-spotted bluethroat and breeds in the subarctic shrub tundra from Scandinavia east to western Alaska and winters in southern Asia in India, Pakistan and the Middle East. The throat is blue with a red spot. 

Illustration of a female of the nominate subspecies from Birds of the World. 

Illustration of a male from the nominate subspecies from Birds of the World. 

Photo of a female in Keoladeo NP in India from Wikipedia. 

Range from Birds of the World.

White-Eared Bulbul

In Keoladeo NP in India I encountered a white-eared bulbul for the first time.

The white-eared bulbul has a brownish-gray body and appears rotund. The tail tapers outwards, starting black and ending in white tips. The head and throat are black with an area around the cheeks having a large white spot. The eye-ring is bare and it has a short beak. The legs are bluish-gray to slaty black. The vent is bright yellow, but none of my photos capture that. 

Illustration from Birds of the World.

It is found in far-western India, much of Pakistan, southern Afghanistan, coastal Iran and portions of Iraq, Kuwait and Bahrain. 

Range map from Birds of the World.

Brahminy Starling

Shortly before our 2025 trip to India I was looking at some publication with photos of birds of India or Asia and saw a photo of a brahminy starling. It had crazy unruly feathers, like a mop-headed rockstar, and I thought it would be fun to see one. I was truly excited in Keoladeo NP when our guide, Ashok, pointed into a tree and said it was a brahminy starling. I took lots of photos. 

As an American I tend to look down upon starlings as we have the European starling which is an over-abundant pest. But I get overseas and many of the most fun and beautiful birds are starlings, including the myna (they used to sell the common myna as a pet at Western Gardens in Salt Lake City when I was growing up and I always think of it as the talking bird). The brahminy starling is also known as the brahminy myna. It has a long wispy black crest of crown feathers, a black forehead and primaries; cinnamon nape, chin, throat and underparts; gray mantle, back, rump, tail and wings; pale green iris; a bare patch of whitish skin behind the eye; bluish base of bill and distally (further out) yellow. The female is like the male, but has a shorter crest and a darker mantle. 

More, but less unruly, photos. 

Illustration from Birds of the World.

Range from Birds of the World.

River Tern

The river tern is also known as the Indian river tern. It has dark gray upperparts; white or very pale gray underparts; a forked tail with long streamers; long pointed wings with pale gray primaries; a stout bill that is bright yellow during breeding and duller yellow with a dusky tip in non-breeding; bright red legs; a black cap in breeding extending below the eye, that lightens to grayish white flecked and streaked with black in non-breeding; a dark mask through the eye and the two longest outer tail feathers are also lost in non-breeding, giving it a shorter tail.  

River terns in breeding season in Ranthambore NP, India, Zone 3.

A breeding bird illustration from Birds of the World.

A non-breeding bird illustration from Birds of the World.

Range map from Birds of the World. 

It is found almost exclusively on freshwater, rarely venturing even to tidal creeks. It is found along inland rivers and lakes. We saw these in Ranthambore NP, Zone 3, on the edge of a small lake. There were only a few of them and they did not seem particularly active. They are listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN and is uncommon. 

Jungle Nightjar

This is a continuation of the thread on my posts the last two days on the black bittern and dusky eagle-owl. I'd provided an incentive of 300 Rupees (a little over $3 USD) for each new lifer (a bird I'd never seen before) our guide could find for me, so long as I could get a photograph of it. It was apparent that our guide, Ashok, a naturalist who'd been working in Keoladeo NP for ten years, knew where to find less frequently seen birds and I wanted to incentivize him to tap into that knowledge. He'd asked if I'd ever seen a black bittern, a dusky eagle-owl or a jungle nightjar before, and I acknowledged I hadn't, so it was apparent he knew where to find them. As our motorized rickshaws were stopped looking at some other birds, Ashok searched some trees with limbs hanging over a stream to the side of the road and found several jungle nightjars perched on the branches. I had a hard time seeing them, so he took some photos with my camera and set up his scope for all to see and took cell phone photos through the scope. 

Jungle nightjar photo taken by Ashok. 

The jungle nightjar is mostly gray with black streaks on the crown and has a rufous wingpatch. The tail is grayish and and has separated black bars. The male has a white throat patch that is broken at the middle and the female has a rufous throat patch and submoustachial streaks. 

This and the following are illustrations of the jungle nightjar from Birds of the World. The one above is a flying female. The two below are males, one perched and one flying. 

Range map from Birds of the World. 

It has previously been called the gray nightjar and Indian jungle nightjar. 

Dusky Eagle-Owl

Yesterday's post was on the black bittern I saw at Keoladeo NP in India. Immediately after seeing the black bittern we continued down a dirt road embankment between two swamps and a while later our guide spotted a dusky eagle-owl way off in the distance. I couldn't pick it out. Our guide set up his spotting scope and I got a view of the eagle-owl through it, then was able to see what to look for and saw it on a flat branch in some large trees. This was an additional confirmation to me that our guide had a trove of birds he'd learned about through his ten years working at Keoladeo and that this eagle-owl was likely a regular at that spot. As I noted in yesterday's post, this is exactly what I wanted when I offered to pay our guide 300 Rupees per each lifer bird he was able to find for me. I got a photo, but it was a long way away and my photo is grainy at best. 

Illustration of the dusky eagle-owl from Birds of the World.

The dusky eagle-owl is large, brown, has prominent ear tufts, and a pale facial disc framed by narrow black lines. The upperparts are dark brown with a grayish tinge, obscurely marked with long, narrow and widely spaced streaks of dark brown, with buffy-white spots on the wing coverts. The tail is dark brown, barred and paler at the tip. The underparts are a very pale brown with narrow black streaks. 

Range map from Birds of the World. 

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.