Early Morning Safari

Day 5 - 1st Oct, 2009
After 4 days of trek, we had covered 66Kms. day 1 - 20Kms, day 2 - 20Kms, day 3 - 8Kms, and day 4 - 18Kms. We saw lots of spotted deers, few sambar deer, couple of indian gaurs, only one group of elephants on the safari road and couple of peacocks. We expected to see more. So, we enquired our guide, he replied that you can see lot of animals in the early morning around 5:00AM to 7:00AM. On day 2, We asked a person in the Information center to arrange for a SUMO. He had managed to arrange the SUMO. As the forest officers open the entry gates late in the morning and close at 6:00PM in the evening, we had requested the driver to come and halt in parambikulam village on the previous evening.

We were ready by 5:00AM, our guide didn't turn up by 5:00AM. As the parambikulam village wakes up at 4:00AM in the morning and couple of tea shops were open, we had our sip of tea, and few bananas. Guide came around 5:30, he may know that the gate opens at 5:30 only, we got into the SUMO and headed to see lot of animals.

As soon as we crossed the gate, we saw a rabbit crossing the road, few spotted deers. Few kms away, we saw few sambar deers at a close distance. Since it was little dark, we could not take clear photos. Few kms away, we saw few indian gaurs, which included a calf drinking milk from it's mother.

Then, we saw few elephants groups at different places.
We saw Grey-headed Fish-eagle on a tree
We reached Kanimara Teak, took lot of photos with the tree,
Few kms away, we saw a tusker and his mother
Then, we saw a group of indian gaurs
We saw lots of spotted deers everywhere.

We saw few peacocksWe saw racket tailed drango, king fisher, minivet, wood pecker, treepie, and few other birds, but could not capture it in photos. Most of the photos included in this blog entry were taken my Moonlight. He felt that he was missing extra zoom lens for his Cannon 450 DSLR. May be we should buy it before our next trek.
You can read more about our parambikulam experience from the main blog entry on the parambikulam trek blog entry .