Pittas

Seven species, and every one of them is a ground bird dressed like it isn't. Pittas are compact, short-tailed, long-legged, and built for hopping through leaf litter — closer in shape and habit to a large thrush than to anything that looks as improbably colourful as they do. Almost the entire group works the forest floor: turning leaves, digging for earthworms and snails, moving in short hops with the tail cocked, and freezing the instant something changes.

That combination — ground-dwelling and gaudy — makes them a particular kind of photographic problem. A pitta on open leaf litter with morning side-light is one of the most rewarding subjects in Indian birding; the same bird in deep shade under a closed canopy, which is where most of them actually spend their time, is nearly impossible. The birds that get photographed well are usually worked from a low angle, at their eye level or below, in the brief windows of hard light that reach the forest floor at the edges of the day.

Indian Pitta is the one most people encounter, since it's a widespread summer breeding migrant that turns up in gardens and scrub as well as forest. The rest of the group — Blue-naped, Blue, Blue-winged, the hooded pittas, and Mangrove Pitta — are far more habitat- and range-restricted, tied to specific forest types in the Northeast, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, or coastal mangrove, and correspondingly harder to find.