Painted Stork

This time it is not about my neighbor bird. We got a chance to visit nearest bird sanctuary, there we could find lots of slim, colorful, long wader birds.

Painted storks have very long, yellow bills, it is curved at the end, mostly help them in catching fishes. These birds are about 95-100cm tall, and they breed in colonies. They live near fresh water sources like pond, flooded fields, and marshes etc. They usually build the nest near water and shares its habitat with other stork species like spoon bills, open bills, herons etc.

They usually feed on fish, frog and large insects. Storks keep its head in the water partly opened and keep swinging the head until it catches a prey.

Crocodiles are the main predators of the Painted Storks. In India it is declared in the list of protected species. The scientific name of the bird is "Mycteria leucocephala".

Ashy Prinia

I got introduced to Ashy Prinias bird quite some time. They are popularly known as Tuwwi birds. The calls of these birds are very familiar to me. Even though it is very small bird, it makes very loud cheerful call. They make "Tuwwi Tuwwi" sound and some kind of repetitive calls. Since bird is very small and they fly very fast it is difficult to identify them while flying. They are not just good singers, they are also very good in building the nest. These birds are also known as tailor birds.

Now, I got an opportunity to observe them from a short distance. I heard the chirping sounds of the bird beside my home. When I observed they were moving around a plant. I understand that they are searching for a plant to construct its nest. I never wanted to miss this opportunity, so I went with my camera to record all its actions. They are not very shy kind of, so it helped me a lot to watch them.

The build construction process was quite amazing. The birds select the quite big and stable leave(s) for nest construction. These birds usually stitch the leaves together to build the nest. If they find a big leave then they stitch the single leave and bring it to a cone shape. Here they were bringing small threads, spider web like materials and stitched two leaves to make a conical shape. They were tying knots at the end of the leaves using its beaks to keep it very stable. Finally they placed soft items like cotton to make cushion and to get the heating effect. By the end of the day nest was almost ready.

Again got a chance to see them after some time. They laid three eggs and were hatched out. Both the birds were feeding its nestlings. They are insectivorous birds, and as I observed they were feeding spider, cockroach etc to its new born nestlings.


These birds belongs to warblers family and are around 13-14cm long. These are the most common birds of urban areas.