Visit to the Manjeera Barrage - in search of the River Tern with Canon 7d and 400mm f5.6 prime!

This Sunday morning, Navin and I decided to head to the Manjeera Barrage around 45 kms from our homes in Hafeezpet. Manjeera is quite popular in Hyderabad due to the fact that almost all drinking water for the city comes from the reservoir here. The easiest way to get there from the city is to get on to NH 9 (Mumbai-Pune Highway), cross Pattancheru, Isnapur, Rudraram and Kandi, take a turn-off to the right at Pothireddypalli village and head in to Sangareddy town. Once at the town, find your way to the police training grounds from where there are clear board markers guiding you all the way up to the Manjeera barrage.

Map Link

Manjeera reservoir is an hot spot as far as birding goes and some of the pictures included in this post are apt testimony to that fact. In an earlier trip we had directly gone up to the barrage and started shooting from there. This time around we wanted to change tack a bit as there were still plenty of areas in and around the reservoir we had not explored yet. So we went straight ahead to the spot near the Shivalaya from where we could directly get to the lake bed. The weekend before we had seen a large gathering of Bronze Winged Jacana and Purple Moor Hen at this location. We had also not failed to notice the Baya Weaver bird nests at the same place just off the main water body. But since we just happened to barge in on the scene, all of the above-mentioned literally flew the coop. This time we were extremely careful about getting as close to this spot as possible without letting the birds know of our presence.

The results of this approach are here to see:




After having spent a fair bit of time at this location, we moved deeper in to the lake bed up to a point where summer had not left its imprint yet. This place was filled with even more bird life but unfortunately could not get close enough to any of them due to the fact that we were approaching them through open ground. I did manage to get a couple of decent flight shots at this point though.

After having spent close to 45 mins at this spot, we decided to head back to the barrage to try our luck with the River Terns. We had visited that barrage a week earlier and were welcomed by some stunning dives from River Terns looking to fish. I wanted to train the 400mm prime on them this time around to get better shots. Unfortunately as luck would have it, we could not get even one decent shot of a river tern. But I did manage to get some decent shots of a snowy egret frolicking in the water in addition to a shot of a darter in the water.




If you are still interested, I have included a few river tern shots from my visit the previous week. Check them out below:




Cheers!