Sandgrouse

Seven species, and all of them built for the same hard trade-off: living in open, dry, often near-waterless country. Sandgrouse look like a cross between a pigeon and a partridge — round-bodied, small-headed, fast and direct in flight, walking on short legs across bare ground rather than hopping through cover. Camouflage does most of the work; a sandgrouse standing still on stony ground or pale soil all but disappears until it moves.

The one behaviour that defines the whole family is the daily flight to water. Most sandgrouse nest and feed well away from any water source and fly in, often in tight flocks and often at a predictable time after sunrise, to drink at a specific pool or waterhole — sometimes from many kilometres out. That single habit is what nearly all sandgrouse photography is actually built around: not finding the bird in the open country where it lives, but finding the water it flies to and waiting.

Chestnut-bellied Sandgrouse is the most widely encountered species across peninsular India's dry grassland and scrub; Painted Sandgrouse turns up on rockier, hillier ground; the rest — Tibetan and Pallas's Sandgrouse, Pin-tailed, Spotted and Black-bellied — are far more restricted, tied to the high Himalaya or the arid northwest and correspondingly harder to catch up with.