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Its always a pleasure to watch Squirrels running around our homes chasing each other playfully. Sometimes we feel they are big menace to our garden eating away  the fruits like Chikkus , Mangoes, Pomegranates and other such fruits. They invade our home also to crunch and munch the pillows and other cushion materials to collect the fibular stuff for their nests . What ever it be, they are cute little animals and  every one of us would like to have them as pets by our side. They eat, fight, play, mate, build nests and procreate in our gardens. We have plenty of such Squirrels visit our garden everyday .. We feed them every afternoon. They know all the inmates in our home. Yet, they are too shy and will not let us take any decent photograph of them. They are always sensitive, playful and restless. I have tried photographing them several times with my camera mounted with 300mm, following them. But they never gave me a chance to make a decent image. It is their timid nature that makes them shun away from humans.  Now that I made up my mind to shoot them without chasing. I decided to use 500mm tele with 1.4X converter resulting into 700mm. I mounted my camera on a tripod with a Heavy ball head to take up the load. Selected a place where they would frequent often. Sat at a distance away from their circle of fear, for about 45 minutes. It finally  turned up to the spot. It started to pick up the grass tips  from the lawn and started to eat, giving me a chance to take the shots. Though it was moving its head here and there, occasionally it gave me a steady pose. But the munching they never stopped. It was so fast for my shutter to arrest.  The light was very low and I had to push my ISO to 800., Shutter @1/250 and aperture @ f/7.1

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Daroji wild life sanctuary has been my favorite place for seeing and photographing Indian Sloth Bears.. Daroji sanctuary is about 364 Km from Bangalore, via Chitradurga, Hospet and further Kamalapur. We stayed at Karnataka government’s tourist guesthouse ( KSTDC’s Mayur Bhuvaneshwari ) at Kamalapura. This is quite a comfortable place to stay and just 12 Km for Daroji.

Daroji  was declared as a Wild life Sanctuary during October 1994. We owe so much to the persons who identified the potential of this place and took steps to protect the Indian sloth Bears.

The sanctuary expands for about 55.87 square kilometers consisting of small hillocks amidst scrub forest. Natural caves found in these hillocks provide comfortable stay for the bears.

This shot was made during March, 2007, late in the evening, using Canon 1Ds Mark 1 with 300mm f/4 lens.  Shutter @ 1/125, Aperture @f/8 at ISO 320.