Ihtisham Kabir

It was two hours before sunset when I entered Hail Haor, though you couldn’t tell the time from the grey sky. The road had weaved through half a dozen villages before the land and the sky abruptly opened up all around me. Inside the Haor, the rice fields were glowing with soft green rice seedlings and the beels were brimming with monsoon water.

In recent years, while travelling abroad for bird photography, I have become an avian tourist. The idea is this. Suppose you are a devoted birder who wants to see the Yellow-headed Picathartes, a bizarre looking rare bird found in western Africa. You decide to fly to Ghana looking for it. But you will need a guide, someone who knows where to find the Picathartes. You will also need to rent a car, make bookings in hotels, etc. Before long you have planned an expedition and your friends join in.

I recently attended my daughter’s graduation from Cornell University. The important day - one of pride and happiness for our entire family - recognized her four years of hard work in two fields: Mathematics and Statistical Science. For me it had additional significance. That’s because me and my son also graduated from the same university.

The morning sky was ominously dark but the wind kept the rain to a thin drizzle. I was walking home after running in the park.

We take pictures every time we go on a trip. We take them as evidence that we have been to this place, perhaps with family, friends or a special person. We take them to remember beautiful views and unusual subjects. And we take them because inside us we are creative.

What satisfied people’s craving for sweet before sugar came along? Well, some people boiled the sap of maple and date to make syrup, but honey was the undisputed king of sweet. Honey bees were domesticated in ancient Egypt where beekeepers used clay jars for their bees to nest in. Beekeeping was also well known in Greek and Roman civilizations.

In 1996 I was working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. Engineering was a wonderful profession, but photography was more fun and so captured my free time. Those days, the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Photographs were part of the Web from its beginning and photographers were starting to use it to reach a large audience.

I broke the big rule about going outdoors in summertime, which is to start early. Owing to unexpected traffic, it was almost ten when I reached Satchori National Park. The forest seemed enveloped by heat and humidity and I heard few bird calls.

The parrot family of birds is a prolific group which includes over 390 species. The family includes parakeets, lorikeets, lovebirds, cockatoos, cockatiels, macaws, amazons, galahs and many others. Some of the most beautiful birds of the world are parrots.

It was late afternoon and the winter sun bathed the forest in its golden light. The stillness of the surroundings was perturbed when,

We often equate Sundarban's wildlife with the Bengal Tiger. Indeed, it is a magnificent creature and justifiably captures our imagination. But you have to be extremely lucky so see it during a tourist trip to Sundarban.

As human civilization has grown ever more mechanized, an instinct deep within us has created a yearning for the wild and the untamed.

For birders, a trip to Hokkaido during winter revolves around the Red-crowned Crane. However, there are several other spectacular birds that one can see in Hokkaido in winter.

The monkey was high up on the jackfruit tree. It was all black except for circles of white around its eyes and mouth. It held something close to its breast, covering it with both arms.

Hokkaido is the northernmost of Japan's four large islands. It has many specialties: fresh dairy products, chocolate, seafood, an icy cold winter, stunning natural beauty and a variety of wildlife. For birders, Red-crowned Cranes playing in Hokkaido's snow is among the world's great avian spectacles.

Fifty thousand people travel every winter to Hokkaido, the northernmost Japanese island. Landing in the small airport at Kushiro, they head to the north-eastern part of the island and brave subzero temperatures and lashing cold winds – all to see a bird. But it is not just any bird. The Red-crowned Crane, white and black with a red spot on its head, is exquisitely beautiful, and its gracious movements on the snow captivate our imagination.

In 2017 I went to Madagascar to look for birds and wildlife. The fourth largest island in the world is home to a large collection of plants and wildlife seen nowhere else. It has several distinct types of terrain: mountainous forests, rainforests, dry (spiny) forests and deserts. This is one of the reasons for the variety of life there.

The first twenty years of my photographic life were spent with black and white film. Finding your subject, you set one or two camera functions, composed the photograph, pressed the shutter and moved on to the next photograph.

For the final time this season, my friend Niaz and I are on a boat on the Padma in Rajshahi. We are watching birds in the chars.

I am visiting Sundarban and, as always, its plants amaze and confound me. How do they survive in this harsh unfriendly environment dominated by saline water and inundated by tides twice daily? How can I learn to identify these plants which are different from those of mainland Bangladesh?