Baya weaver:Ploceus philippinus (Female)

Baya weaver:Ploceus philippinus (Female)

 

Baya weaver: Ploceus philippinus (Female)

Coppersmith barbet: Megalaima haemacephala

Coppersmith barbet
 Megalaima haemacephala

There are reasons for the lull in fresh posting to the blog: besides work grabbing priority, disaster struck me yet again. Way back, on a long tour of Rajasthan with family, I lost data from 32Gb SD card. I learnt my lesson, reduced my ignorance about such tech matters, and went ahead and purchased two large capacity external hard disk drives of reputed brands for backing up my data. I went ahead and backed up my data, distributing it between the two as per relevance and relationship to the theme  assigned for each external drive. For the past couple of years, my smugness at my elevation to a reduced level of ignorance knew no bounds and I merrily went ahead storing and processing photos, and expanding my database tables without further reducing my ignorance about data storage do's and don'ts any further. Smugness got hit. By a simple straight punch, but with catastrophic effects - my birding and wildlife TB drive was accidentally disconnected by a careless movement of my arm, and BAM!, my drive went dead. Reputation of a company wasn't  a shield after all. Neither was it a panacea for laziness in knowing more about how to store AND protect data. I didn't create "back-up images" or obtain further security through a "cloud". My docketed albums are gone. Along with my reports, databases, reference materials etc. Yet again, I'm wiser after. Now, I have to peck through my SD cards to restore portions of my data. Those deleted or overwritten (thanks to unaware smugness) are efforts up in the sky and clouds or space beyond now.  I tried some things through internet tutorials but in vain. The spirit has taken hard kicks in its backside.

Returning to he Coppersmith barbet in hand, let me state that this is my first decent quality photograph of the species. Invariably, they have either been beyond my reach, swifter than my reflexes, or simply well-hidden behind interfering leaves, twigs and branches which is their wont. They seek high perches on old trees to broadcast themselves in the manner of a coppersmith hammering the element to mould something out of it. Here was this specimen cavorting all over a bare trunk of a dead tree at eye-level too! It was a lucky day indeed.

I shall edit later to add the Taxonomy and other details after I rebuild a data storage and retrieval mechanism to house a new database which I will have to build from scratch.

To shake my enthusiasm out of its current dejection, a birding trip is in order to start with. The longish grieving at the start was necessary also.

©2015 Prashant V Tenjarla All Rights Reserved

Photographed at Keoladeo Ghana (Keoladeo National Park), Bharatpur, Rajasthan, India on 29.7.2015 using Nikon D7200 and Tamron 150-600mm system.

Exif data: f/6.3/600mm; ISO 100. Image has subsequently been cropped and exposure adjusted.