Trogons

A trogon does not behave like a bird that wants to be found. It sits upright and motionless in the mid-storey shade, sometimes for many minutes together, and turns its head rather than its body. You almost never catch one by movement. You find it by call, and then you spend a long time working out which shadow it is sitting in.

That stillness is the whole photographic problem. The bird is patient and the light is not. It perches inside the canopy with the bright forest behind it, so the default exposure gives you a silhouette against a blown background, and the colour that makes a trogon worth photographing lives entirely on the front of the bird. Everything is a negotiation between the shade it has chosen and the gap in the leaves you have to shoot through.

India has three of them, and they do not overlap. One belongs to the Western Ghats, two to the wet forests of the Eastern Himalaya. Getting all three means two very different trips.