December 21, 2023

Thursday, 11:30 PM

Pompayya Malemath Homestay, 

Town Kamalapura, 

District Vijayanagara,

Karnataka, India

We went to the Daroji Sloth Bear Sanctuary and dedicated today’s entire day to the slot bears, sitting in the bear hides made of iron cage, from where one can shoot the bears in their natural habitat up-close without disturbing them with one’s movement. There is some protection offered by these metal hides but if a bear gets really annoyed and mounts an attack, the hide wouldn’t stand in his way because a bear is an extremely powerful animal and an angry bear is virtually unstoppable. So the best one can do is keep quiet and watch without making any sudden movement when the bears are around. And that’s exactly what we did. We held our breath and kept shooting the furry giants. 

We got some pretty good shots of both grown-up bears and the cubs up-close, when they ventured close to our hide without any of them getting too curious about us, the creatures in the cage, thankfully. We also got some excellent pictures of the peacocks and other birds in close vicinity in addition to those of mongooses. 

Around the sunset time we returned and came across Pompayya ji, who took us to show the owls of the area on our request. He did show us a few owls but we could not get any pictures because the owls here are quite shy and take to flight the moment they sense human presence.