My World of Pictures: Bhigwan "Birding Paradise of Maharashtra"

After a long time, I could get my camera out of the bag for some photography.

Bhigwan is a location approximately 300 kms from the city of Mumbai. This large lake is formed by the back water Ujani dam on river Bhima. The large water body attracts some great migratory birds during winter time including Greater flamingo, Ruddy Shelduck, Bar-Headed Goose and other birds.

We drove via the Mumbai-Pune expressway, driving through Katraj and the village of Jejuri before reaching the town of Baramati.

We reached Baramati about 1.30pm and dropped our bags into the room. We picked up our camera gear and headed out. Had lunch in a nearby restaurant and drove to Bhigwan which is 35 kms away from Baramati on the Pune-Solapur highway. The actual bird sanctuary is called Kumbhargaon Bird sanctuary. We reached the village of Kumbhargaon at about 2.30pm.

This year the water level in the lake is very low because of shortage of rainfall in India and the birding season is not expected to last more than 3-4 months. The weather over the 2 days was beautiful for photography and bird watching.

Our first boat trip started at about 3pm and went on till sunset. It was birds everywhere. The most common being brown-headed gulls and Terns (River Terns & Whiskered Terns).

The next day we left our hotel by 6.30am to reach Bhigwan by 7am. Since it was Christmas, there was a lot of crowd and we had to wait for nearly 45 mins for our boat to turn up. Again the boating lasted for almost 3 hours and we had our hearts fill of native and migratory birds.

The highlight of the trip was close view of an Osprey. It was sitting on a perch in the middle of the lake and we moved very slowly to get some real close shots.

For the first time I got good shots of birds in flight. We returned home at about 10.30pm through traffic jams in Pune. Tired but satisfied.

All pictures shot with Canon EOS 7D camera with Canon 100-400 lens.