Bird Photography · The Indian List
3 of 8 species photographed
Lapwings are the birds that give you away. Long before you have seen anything, one lifts off a bund and starts screaming, and every other bird within half a kilometre knows exactly where you are. Photographers learn their alarm call early, usually while watching something else disappear because of it.
They are plovers that gave up on being inconspicuous. Ground-nesting, open-country, upright and long-legged, with bare wattles and facial skin in colours that have no business on a shorebird — red, yellow, wet-looking. They stand in the open and dare you to come closer, and the nest is a scrape in the dirt with nothing over it, which is why the adults are so loud.
Eight species reach India. Two of them you can find almost anywhere; the rest ask for particular ground at a particular time of year, and one of them is now among the most endangered birds that still visits the country.
Unmistakable — long wispy crest, dark glossed green upperparts, broad round wings in flight. Common across Europe, uncommon here.
A West Asian and African bird that barely reaches India. Black cap and throat, white cheeks, sandy back. Not a species anyone finds on purpose here.
Black crown and throat, grey-brown body, black legs rather than yellow. Tied closely to undisturbed river sandbars, which is why it is going the way the sandbars are.
Black cap with a thin white border, sandy-brown body, and a bright yellow wattle and bill. Quieter and warier than the Red-wattled, and it prefers dry ground where the other prefers wet — the two rarely stand in the same field.
Grey head and breast with a clean dark chest band, yellow bill tipped black. Larger and more sluggish than the resident lapwings.
Black head and breast, white cheek stripe running down the neck, brown back, and the red wattle and bill base that name it. Long yellow legs. The commonest lapwing in India and the loudest bird on most Indian farmland.
Buff-brown with a bold black-and-white head pattern. A global rarity that has collapsed within living memory; most Indian records now involve single birds or small parties.
Plain-faced, no wattle, very long yellow legs, and an all-white tail that is obvious the moment it flies. The most wader-like of the Indian lapwings in behaviour.
Photographs by Fareed Mohmed
Photograph by Fareed Mohmed
