Anakulam

Anakulam is about 40km west of Munnar and is renowned as an elephant watchpoint. Asian elephants come down to the river in the evenings to drink. It's almost as guaranteed as it gets with wild elephants. The problem is though, it can be anytime from about 4pm to 10pm so you may get lucky and see them in daylight, or you may have a long wait and see them by floodlight. 

We made two visits, the first today and then another on Saturday and despite waiting for a combined total of about eight hours, on neither day did they come to the river. All was not lost though, because at about 5pm today this juvenile male elephant wandered into the clearing. We held our breath, would it's mother and the rest of the herd follow? Unfortunately no, it disappeared back into the jungle and this was the last we saw of any elephant. Slightly disappointing but still a tremendous experience.

Asian elephants differ from their African cousins in several respects, including smaller ears, four toes not three and in the fact that only the males have tusks. Therefore I'm assuming that this must be a young male.

While we were waiting though we did see quite a lot of other stuff and best of all an Asian openbill stork and a brown mottled owl, the latter dropping onto the the ground and hopping around for a bit before disappearing. Also a striated heron, only the second I have seen in India, plus several Malabar grey hornbills. The Asian openbill was a species that I have long dreamed about seeing but sadly it was only a flight view in semi-daylight. Perhaps I'll see more later in the holiday.

Striated heron is the Asian equivalent of the North American green heron, and in my opinion both species are the most enigmatic of herons. So characterful!