Winter pics

Tundra Swans:



Another Tundra Swan:


Ruddy Duck:


White-Throated Sparrow:


Yellow-Bellied Woodpecker:


Fox Sparrow:


A garden snake we saw on the trail during one of our late winter walks:




Random pictures:






A sign of spring: bluebird have arrived! They show up in late February, even before the robins - although they are harder to see.

India Jungle and Periyar Lake

Jungle in Periyar National Park:



Bamboo grove:


These tracks were left by a wild tiger, one of a few left in Periyar park:


And these tracks are from a wild jaguar. I asked the ranger how he can tell which is by a jaguar and which is by a tiger, and he said that it's by the distance between the claws:


In Indian jungle, tigers and jaguars are not the only things that have claws:


A tree being strangled by a ficus (pretty much everything you see here, except for the horizontal branches on the left, are the ficus):




Periyar lake was formed by a dam build in 1895 by the British during the colonial period in India.


When the dam was built, it flooded the valley behind it, where some tall teak trees had stood. Their remains are still visible sticking out of the lake today.






This is another lake, called Idukki Lake:


It is also held back by a dam, the Idukki dam:


Some general pictures from the Periyar park and surrounding Cardamom hills:

Monkey business

From India and the Philippines:

Rhesus Macaque - the most common monkey in India:


Gray Langur - the biggest of the Old World monkeys found in India:


Nigiri Langur - endemic to Western Ghats of India, and endangered there due to deforestation:


Philippine Long-tailed Macaque - endangered, but found commonly in Subic Bay, Philippines...


... as indeed these signs show:




More monkey pictures from India:

Urban India

Traditional Hindu temple in Coimbatore, India:



And traditional mode of transportation:


Click on this video to experience a street crossing in India:


Another video of a street crossing:






Load tests:








Driving exam:


"I want to drive too!"


American-style warning in the hotel pool:


Some pictures from the flight back to the US, on Emirates Airlines, which flies the largest fleet of the double-decker A380s planes in the world:


Airport in Dubai was full of them:


The price tag for each is more than $500,000,000. Just in this picture, there are 4 billion dollars worth of planes parked at the gates.


Dubai - the bad side. Unfortunately, the downtown with its skyscrapers was too far away and too covered in haze to take a good picture.


This set of fields and the mountains in the back is Iran - we flew over it on the way to New York:


And this cloud-covered mountain range is Norway: