The Green Ogre

Read TIMES OF NEED - Vol 1 #3 - THERMAL AND A QUARTER Online Free | entertainment | YUDU [del.icio.us]

2009-10-30T04:20:52-07:00

TIMES OF NEED is Thermal And A Quarter's monthly e-zine containing our irreverently relevant, mercilessly funny analysis of politics, business, media, entertainment and current affairs. Our tagline 'Say no to Page Threes' is fair enough, because TIMES OF NEED only has two pages!

Encounter: Russet Sparrow

2009-10-25T12:57:00.006+05:30

Like thousands of coins jingling in hundreds of fists, the chirruping of sparrows heralds dusk. Trees quiver as roosting flocks fuss like train passengers arguing over berths. The din dies down with the fading light and all is quiet again. Until the morning, when breakfast squabbles are made public and flocks prepare to go about their business foraging around homesteads, fields and forest clearings.

Few people give sparrows a second look, but the first glance itself evokes tender smiles because nearly everybody has observed the disappearance of House Sparrows from cities. However, they are still up and about in villages where old-fashioned houses offer them the shelter of eaves and awnings and their pastoral environs an ample supply of food.

In the Himalaya, though, it may serve us well to keep our eyes peeled for the Russet Sparrow (Passer rutilans cinnamomeus). Its call is similar to the House Sparrow's, but males in breeding plumage are easy to tell by their rich cinnamon crowns and backs. For this reason, it was earlier called the Cinnamon Sparrow (a much more evocative name, in my humble but effete opinion). This male (in winter plumage) was photographed at the Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam guest house in Ukhimath, Uttarakhand among a flock of House Sparrows (Passer domesticus).

The House Sparrows, of course, were busy making their tribe increase. Which raised the following questions:

a) Do the two species interbreed where their ranges overlap?
b) Do House Sparrows breed year round while Russet Sparrows have a fixed breeding season?

Someone in the know might be able to tell me.

Photographs © Bijoy Venugopal. All rights reserved.

Encounter - The Himalayan Monal

2009-10-13T12:16:00.019+05:30

In May 2007, on my first visit to the Uttarakhand Himalaya, the Himalayan Monal (Lophophorus impejanus) proved utterly elusive. Fighting altitude sickness in the foggy heights of Bedni Bugyal, I was offered a tachistoscopic glimpse of a metallic blue streak with a white rump and an orange tail. That's about all. Out of reluctant pride, I ticked my checklist. But all along, I felt guilty that my sighting was of such low quality that it hardly merited an entry.

Payback time arrived two years later.

In the third week of September 2009, my friend Sahastra and I trekked through the alpine forests and grasslands of Chopta and Tungnath. Tungnath, at 12,073 feet, is the third of the five Kedars (where Shiva's dismembered body is believed to have fallen on earth) and the highest Shiva shrine in India. It is believed to have been built a thousand years ago.

At 12,073 ft, Tungnath is the highest Shiva shrine in India, and possibly in the world

The grey stone temple blends well into its backdrop: plunging cliffs watered by a trickle of sweet springs and rock faces slathered with alpine vegetation -- grasses, daisies, primula, gentian, marsh marigolds, docks, and arrangements of ferns, lichens and mosses that would chasten even the most sylvan of landscape artists.

A few hundred feet below, the grassland (or bugyal, as it is known locally) is broken by shrubs like juniper and a dense undergrowth of dwarf rhododendron. Here, rufous-bellied tits and orange-flanked bush robins dart inconspicuously along with Hume's warblers and grey bushchats. Lower down, the grassland meets the first trees of the forest -- stands of fern-girded oak and the relatively inviolate deodars.

Mist cloaked the forest, making birding impossible

But it was not here that we spotted our first Monal. On a misty afternoon in Chopta, 4 km downhill at the base of the Tungnath trail, we took a walk along the road hoping to spot something. Two days ago, we had been gifted with the lucky sighting of three (first, one for sorrow and then two for joy) Yellow-throated Martens, whom I dubbed Marten, Luther and King. But this afternoon's pursuit appeared to be fruitless. The dense fog made photography impossible and walking dangerous. We kept to the road to avoid toppling off a cliff. Halting abruptly at a bend, where a shepherd's trail branched off into the forest, Sahastra hissed: "Pheasant!"

Sadly, the human eye does not come equipped with fog-lamps. We could tell the shape of a large brown bird, not quite peahen-sized, with a mottled back and a prominent white ring where its folded wings met the base of its tail. We froze to avoid flushing it but it ambled into the thicket and into the cover that the fog offered. That evening, a look at the pages of Grimskipp told us that it was indeed a female Monal. Not quite the appetiser we craved, but enough for a tick on the checklist.

But that first morning at Tungnath was where the Himalayan Monal revealed itself to us. We saw two males foraging unconcernedly on the verge of the forest. And then we flushed two hens, which whirred up in the air like partridges, arced and descended into the oblivion of the rhododendron shrubbery. Thus encouraged, we descended into the shrubbery and were rewarded with the sight of three more male birds. We heard them call -- a loud, not unmusical bugling -- and saw them flash their white rumps in flight. We were quite overwhelmed by the glut of good fortune.

We returned to Tungnath again two days later, riding mules at the crack of dawn to get to the summit of Chandrashila (13,386 feet above MSL) in time to catch a glimpse of the snow-capped peaks of Trishul and Chaukhamba before the rising mists blotched them out. At a tea stop, a beautiful red fox slunk past us, its coat rich red and slightly grizzled with a creamy white tip to the tail. Further up, we glimpsed a magnificent male Monal, and then another with two hens. We flushed another bird off a cliff edge, and its brilliant metallic blue plumage glimmered as it caught the sun.

We felt so accomplished that we wanted to take the rest of the day off and laze. But like diligent birders, we put indolence aside and got down to work. Through the day, more Monals showed themselves to us. This was indeed a happy hunting ground for the state bird of Uttarakhand (and the national bird of Nepal). That evening, we heard the Monal call as dusk darkened the Himalayan sky. On our second descent of Chandrashila, we saw more than three or four birds foraging late into the twilight.

Early next morning, as we left Tungnath for Chopta, we came upon a Monal cock foraging at eye-popping proximity near a cliff edge. It seemed unperturbed by our presence and took a few unhurried steps as we approached. The sun was not yet up and the dawn light was very tricky. Sahastra called out metering instructions to me as I battled vertigo in my attempt to photograph the bird. As I struggled with the exposure, a hen walked into the frame. And for the next five minutes we had the time of our life as the cliffside became dotted with Monals -- at least three males and four females.

Finally, my encounter with the Monal had been fulfilling. It was hard to leave the hills without a pang gnawing at my heart.

The interzone between forest and alpine grassland is the typical habitat of the Himalayan Monal

While foraging, Monals seek the shelter and obscurity of the dwarf rhododendron thickets

From behind a rock ledge, a helmeted head peeks

Suddenly, the hillside was alive with Monals

Not to be outdone, a queen joins her king

Stately enough to dent a peacock's pride

ALSO SEE:

My Facebook photo album 'Himalaya: The Monsoon's Last Breath'

Sahastra's video of the Monal:

Monal at Dawn from Sahastra Rashmi on Vimeo.

Photographs © Bijoy Venugopal

Can we refuse the world's trash?

2009-10-12T17:16:00.000+05:30

It's something we have read about before, but this story by Tehelka puts all the canards and reports in perspective: India has become the ultimate receptacle of the first world's trash. As if we don't generate enough of our own.

Excerpt:

According to an estimate, India imported around 16.8 lakh tonnes of ‘waste paper’ in 2005-2006, valued at about $290 million. However, environmental activists say that much of the socalled recyclable waste that is imported is trash and ends up in Indian dumps, landfills and sometimes, even farmlands. In September last year, environmental activist Nityanand Jayaraman discovered that ITC’s paper factory in Coimbatore had dumped hundreds of tonnes of municipal solid waste — household garbage, in other words — from the UK into agricultural wells in the area. “These paper factories import only ‘low level sorted’ waste since that is cheap. However, usually only about twenty percent of such waste can be reclaimed or recycled. The rest is trash and is dumped,” says Nityanand. Given the millions of tonnes of ‘waste paper’ entering the country each year, if this is the ratio of recyclable to non-recyclable items in imported waste, this could mean that India, a country with enough waste of its own, could be importing a truly colossal amount of non-recyclable waste from other countries. According to details in TEHELKA’s possession, the top five importers of paper waste at the Tuticorin port account for about 2 lakh metric tonnes annually. ITC, Kolkata alone imported about 1 lakh metric tonnes of paper waste through this port in the period between 2007-2009.

To think that we are greedy for the world's trash is a frightening indicator of what our people will do for money. What else the floodgates of greed will let in we do not know.

And then again, from The Fun Theory, a nice reminder that getting people to put their trash in the right place is actually possible. All it takes is some imagination and a sense of humour. So effective that people will refuse to throw their trash anywhere else.

The Green Ogre - All things Eco, not necessarily Umberto

Cheddar Moon

2009-09-12T11:32:00.001+05:30

Caught her waking
two moons ago
over a city unaware
of its certain doom
ballooning
unnoticed
unsung
a giant speech blurb
full of
aching emptiness and
terrible secrets to tell us
without a tongue
to twist them into words

Mascot of Nandi Hills - voting open

2009-08-29T16:56:00.002+05:30

This?

Or this?

Test-driving the FZ28

2009-08-18T10:48:00.004+05:30

Snapped these up with the new box on a walk in the park on Saturday morning.

Calotropis gigantea - one of my favourite weeds, because there's always much happening on its leaves and flowers.

See - what did I tell you? This chap was sitting here waiting for brunch.

Closer crop. I need a macro lens for any more detail. Donors, listening?

'Tis the season for Tulip Trees.

Encounter - White-eared Bulbul

2009-08-07T10:00:00.000+05:30

In Horse With No Name, Neil Young sang: "In the desert, you can't remember your name."

It's sort of what you feel when you see a bulbul in the desert, comfortable among the spare vegetation. Meet the White-eared Bulbul, locally common in the salt desert but rare elsewhere in India. We found parties of these birds in every little oasis of greenery, picking away at insects and consuming available plant nectar.

In Kutch, where there are few large trees, stands of exotic Prosopis juliflora have begun to make their presence felt in the desert vegetation. Hopping among these low trees are these bulbuls with a difference - their strikingly contrasted pied heads make them resemble slightly oversize Great Tits. Their crests are short, and their musical fluting calls are similar to those of other bulbuls.

But what sets them apart is the sulphur-yellow vent. In overall coloration, the White-eared Bulbul is very similar to the Himalayan Bulbul, but the latter's range ends at the foothills (while the White-eared Bulbul's begins in central and northwestern India and stretches westward to Arabia). Also, the Himalayan Bulbul's Elvis Presley hairdo is tell-tale.

Photograph: © Sandeep Somasekharan

Darwin's finches, a scrapbook from MyARKive

2009-08-06T13:05:00.001+05:30

Arkive.org is a fantastic resource offering information about the world's endangered species. I found this scrapbook on Darwin's finches very handy.

Darwin's finches - a MyARKive scrapbook

Encounter - White-browed Bulbul

2009-08-05T14:41:00.006+05:30

It makes itself scarce. Its call is so enmeshed in the thickets and brambles of forest undergrowth that it is part of the sound you take back with you from the jungle. But few first-time birders I have escorted on their maiden outing have come away after a good look at this fellow.

The bird in the picture is the White-browed Bulbul (Pycnonotus luteolus). It has one of the longest and most exuberant of songs - bursting out in a rush of joyous chuckling notes. One of my early birding mentors described it to me, quite memorably, as a marble being shaken in a bottle. But look in that direction, and the stage-shy songster would have dived for cover.

So, take a good look at this guy here and memorise the sight - the bright white supercilium is diagnostic. A crestless bulbul, unlike the Red-vented and Red-whiskered Bulbuls, this fellow's dietary habits have been observed to be similar to that of its cousins, which means it feeds largely on fruit, insects and flower nectar. When it's breeding time, the White-browed Bulbul makes a cup-shaped nest in a short tree, where it lays two to four eggs in a clutch.

So, the next time you hear that bubbly song, you know whom to look out for.

Photograph: © Sandeep Somasekharan

The Mockingbird, mocked

2009-07-30T20:21:00.001+05:30

Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality.

- Tom Robbins
Skinny Legs And All

Sherna Khambatta Literary Agency - India, Book Agent [del.icio.us]

2009-07-21T05:55:47-07:00

Sen. John Kerry does an Al Gore

2009-07-10T17:50:00.002+05:30

Stepping into the shoes that we think Al Gore has now vacated since accepting the Nobel Prize, Sen. John Kerry takes over as the Next Big American Voice Against Global Warming. But despite the big press, the noises he is making are no different. And particularly, coming from another Presidential also-ran, they seem too much like - excuse the loaded ecological simile - a carbon copy. But, of course, this being G8 (as opposed to F1) season, the air is thicker with allegations than vehicular exhaust. And it's not surprising for America to flex its sanctions muscle in order to thwart third-world stances on the issue.

Writing in The Daily Beast, the senator warns:

Atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels have risen 38% in the industrial era, from 280 to 385 parts per million (ppm). Scientists have warned that anything above 450 ppm—a warming of 2 degrees Celsius—will result in an unacceptable risk of catastrophic climate change.

And the characteristic refrain, painted over with stars and stripes, goes:

The bottom line is that failure to tackle climate change risks much more than a ravaged environment: It risks a much more dangerous world, and a gravely threatened America.

Echoes of An Inconvenient Truth? Why aren't we surprised?

Perhaps the good senator, who hails from the cornfields of Iowa, should have read The Stern Review instead.

Sen. John Kerry does an Al Gore [del.icio.us]

2009-07-10T05:20:43-07:00

The Himalaya Story - from 2007

2009-07-07T10:59:00.003+05:30

Footloose in Garhwal, my travelogue on our trek to Bedni Bugyal in April-May 2007, is finally available for viewing. It had been privately circulated until now.

Here it is:

On Yudu (Firefox users may have some Flash 10-related viewing trouble):

We're sorry, your browser doesn't support IFrames. You can still &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.yudu.com/item/details/69678/Footloose-in-Garhwal?refid=21486"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;visit this item.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;, however.

On Scribd:

Footloose in Garhwal

The name of the bird

2009-07-01T09:57:00.000+05:30

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Encounter: Chinkara or Indian Gazelle

2009-06-10T15:32:00.007+05:30

“Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker of horizon’s fluid line.”
– Stephen Spender

Very near the end of a long, fruitless afternoon tailing invisible bustards in Naliya grassland of Kutch, we were in no mood to savour the sunset muddying the windmill-stippled horizon. Forget the fact that we had, during that day, picked out chestnut-bellied sandgrouse camouflaged among the tinder-dry tussocks. Or watched a jungle cat hunt a spiny-tailed lizard. Or, as dusk neared, blinked our eyes to the silhouettes of nearly fifty or so Pallid and Montagu's harriers settling down to roost in the grass.

Such selfish ingrates!

But then, our eyes were drawn to a troika of little ungulates chasing each other in single file across the yellow grass. The Chinkara or Indian Gazelle (Gazella bennettii), more of a newsmaker for its association with a certain trigger-happy Bollywood hunk. We saw them on more than one occasion, and always in groups of three - we couldn't quite ascertain if the ménage à trois was the regular marital arrangement with the Chinkaras, or if they were just respectable double-income one-kid family parties.

Males are slightly larger than females and have longer, thicker horns. Mostly they trot, but when approached they break into a light, easy lope that chews up the miles faster than you can count them.

The dipping sun lit this fellow nicely, gilding his fawn coat to a glaze as Sandy's shutter whirred and clicked greedily. Something to remember the evening by.

Photo copyright: Sandeep Somasekharan. All rights reserved

An elephantine storm in a teacup

2009-06-08T09:40:00.004+05:30

The Nature Conservation Foundation's EcoLogic blog has been around for some time now and its content is on my reading list. NCF does so well what other eco-research blogs fail to do - present great, relevant scientific information in a thought-provoking and easy-to-read way. Not to mention some high quality writing.

"An apology to the Iyerpadi gentleman", T R Shankar Raman's recent blog post on the problem of human-animal conflict, is a great example of science writing - the science is solid but not overwhelming, and it is extremely easy to read. If there are any J-school kids out there who want to take up a career in science writing (still a very, very nascent field here in India), this blog post is a mandatory cut-and-keep.

Raman (those close to him know him better as Sridhar) and his wife Divya work with NCF in Valparai. On this fragile but disturbed plateau in the Anamalais stand some of the last pristine Western Ghats rainforests, fragmented and continuously usurped by tea gardens and eco-tourism that's heavier on tourism than eco.

Tea gardens are not quite elephant-friendly - they offer little by way of cover, and the bushes grow densely. Elephants use ancient routes to water bodies, on which they depend. Of course, much has been changed (by humans) on these ancient routes. Ergo, the pachyderms occasionally trample through tea gardens and the settlements among them. The animals are also accused by local people of raiding their provision shops. While this, on occasion, has been documented as true by NCF researchers, investigations have shown that many 'raids' have been instances of villagers taking advantage of the situation at hand, and conveniently blaming the elephants. In a fragile and sensitive ecosystem such as that in Valparai, the conflict for space and resources between man and elephant is a screenshot of a larger systemic problem - proverbially, an elephantine storm in a teacup.

Carbon footprint - what a feat!

2009-06-05T09:01:00.007+05:30

It's that day of the year when everyone gets excited about their carbon footprint, only to have nothing to do with it when the day is done. So far, the hubbub was restricted to corporates who chose the occasion of World Environment Day to make a grand pretence of atoning for their misdeeds - clever shareholder communication, in other words. But now, our otherwise unapologetic government has also jumped in.

The tone of advertisements issued by government departments in India have always been a half-hearted, halfway effort between bone-numbing pedantry and pedagogic inanity festooned with mugshots of the irascible rascals responsible for siphoning off public money for their private interests. That's a lot of superlatives, yes.

But consider this ad published today in The Times of India by the Karnataka Pollution Control Board:

It says 'Don't leave your carbon footprint on the earth'. Ah, how evocative. Now, will they please suggest a list of places where we can leave it? And isn't this whole business about reducing the carbon footprint since it's impossible not to leave behind one at all. It's clear that the gurus at the KPCB are latecomers into the talk. So don't even expect them to walk it.
Now, the only recycled material in this ad is the content, which is clearly lifted from any other public service noise that just anyone else in the world is making about 'carbon footprint', viz:

a) Use bicycles/ make cycling a habit: Cute, but the only cycling I get to do is in the gym. Because if I venture out into the real world on a bicycle, there is no guarantee of returning home alive riding it. Are there bicycle lanes anywhere in India? Of course, the KPCB can say that they are not the "concerned department", in more than one sense of the term.

b) Plant and nurture trees: Try telling this to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), which has to date connived with the state Forest Department to rid the city of its green cover under the pretext of development works. And in the place of our banyans and peepals have come fast-growing copper pods, rain trees and gulmohurs - introduced species that are ornamental but otherwise practically useless. And so easily felled by a good gale.

That said, it's a good gesture. Even if the Board's responsibility ends here.

Talking of pollution control, every month the Bangalore Traffic Police embarks on a conscientious mission to enforce discipline among Bangalore's polluting vehicles. They stop vehicles (apparently at random) and demand to see an emission test certificate - you know, the ones issued by those shady little booths attached to fuel stations. It's a High Court Order, they will tell you if you argue, and brandish in your face a faded photostat copy of something Devanagari.

Now, this certification is a mere formality for most Euro II and Euro III vehicles but somehow, something magic happens and turns the attention of our devoted men in uniform from the smoke-belching and utterly un-roadworthy trucks, buses and three-wheeled tempos grunting past you with impunity to your own uncertified but otherwise unpolluting Euro II vehicle. Of course, you don't have to flex your cerebral muscles to deduce that the constables' discretion extends only to drivers of vehicles who look like they are carrying the requisite amount payable as fine.

And yes, in the end everyone is fine with that and nobody raises an alarm. Such good citizens.

As for carbon footprint - I know plenty of enraged drivers who'd like to leave a nice sooty one on the faces of those cops.

It's World Environment Day. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Furious Aila and prescient Amitav

2009-06-02T11:28:00.004+05:30

The minutes crept by and the objects flying through the air grew steadily larger. Where first there had been only twigs, leaves and branches there were now whirling coconut palms and spinning tree trunks. Piya knew that the gale had reached full force when she saw something that looked like a whole island hanging suspended above their heads: it was a large clump of mangroves, held together by the trees' intertwined roots.

- Amitav Ghosh
The Hungry Tide

Ghosh makes the spectacle of the whirling wind seem as enchanting as in The Wizard of Oz but infinitely more threatening. His writing is magical - as if he has seen it all.

Or perhaps, as people of the Sunderbans might say, if you have seen one cyclone and lived to tell the tale, you have seen them all. In these parts, do they measure the longevity of their lives by the storms they have survived?

The Sunderbans and their neighbourhood have been battered time and again by the most furious and bloodthirsty of storms. Each cyclone whips up a seemingly unending wave of suffering that generation after generation of people must endure. Their wretched homes torn asunder, their emaciated livestock drowned, and their meagre savings gone to seed, the survivors are perhaps unluckier than the victims. They are faced with the crushing and intimidating prospect of beginning their lives all over again. As if this were not sorrow enough, they are encumbered by the absence of family members who were once their sustenance and stay.

Number-obsessed statisticians are auditing assets gone to waste and counting bodies - human, mostly. Environmentalists are mourning the loss of habitats, which have either wiped out or displaced the region's fauna: dolphins, gharials, tigers... and these are only the charismatic species. How much has been lost forever we can only tell when the hungry tide is satiated.

Of these sinister storms, Cyclone Aila was the most recent. And she certainly won't be the last.

Despite all the technology at our command (and our consequent hubris), we will never be capable of stopping natural disasters in their tracks. Meteorologists can issue warnings. Governments can cry out for aid. Relief workers can mop up the mess. And the media can weep and wail, insinuate and blame, and generally prolong the suffering for as long as public sentiment lasts.

But despite all of that, we cannot predict the weight of nature's wrath. We can only measure its aftermath. And count our dead.

Knights of the Western Ghats - Kalyan Varma's photoessay

2009-05-26T09:17:00.005+05:30

Kalyan Varma has relaunched his website, and with it, some very absorbing new features. His photo-essay on the Lion-tailed Macaques (Macaca silenus) of the Western Ghats is beautifully captured and enchantingly told.

Ok, ok, I know I'm going wild with the superlatives, but great photography often does that to me. And by great photography, I don't refer only to images that dazzle with their excellent composition and perfect lighting. You know, the kind that has a congregation of fellow-shutterbugs go 'ooh' and 'aah' and launch into impromptu discourses on F-stops, and finally sign off with the intriguing three-letter acronym (TLA) 'TFS' (fans of India Nature Watch will know what that means).

Kalyan inspires more than that. As I have said in these pages before, I admire his prowess for telling stories with his photographs, to capture interesting and insightful aspects of animal behaviour, and more than ever, to underscore the imperative for conservation.

And finally, because the Lion-Tailed Macaque (or LTM, if you prefer TLAs) is itself a species very dear to me. And because on my visit to Valparai, Divya Mudappa of the NCF told me the heart-rending story of a roadkill involving a pregnant female. And because Kalyan's camera was there, without blinking, to grieve that grisly death, this story must be told.

And no one but Kalyan can tell it like it is.

Kalyan Varma's photoessay>>

Encounter - the Indian Desert Jird

2009-05-23T12:21:00.007+05:30

In January, on our visit to Kutch, we drove 300 km from the CEDO camp to Dholaveera, where the remnants of a Harappan archaeological site quietly awaits visitors amid the salty drifting dust of the Great Rann of Kutch. The site is fabulous, and I was miffed that the caretaker did not allow me to videograph it. But photographs were allowed, and our dear shutterbug Sandy lost no opportunity to snap up the excavated ruins.

On our way back, we noticed a warren of little burrows in the loose earth. Like little tricks of light, puffs of dust grew beady black eyes and scurried out of the ground. Everybody else caught sight of the culprit and sighed sighs of discovery. I rubbed my eyes, missed the target, and rubbed my eyes again. I took my glasses off, put them on again, took them off again and rubbed my eyes again. Still, nothing.

And then, as suddenly as I had missed it, I saw it - a little, fawn, rat-like fellow chomping on a green leaf and dragging it into the burrow - the Indian Desert Jird (Meriones hurrianae). This diurnal rodent lives in huge colonies and is a great food source for many predators, including desert cats, jungle cats, jackals, mongooses and many raptors.

Indian Desert Jird (Meriones hurrianae)

All photographs copyright Sandeep Somasekharan. Used with permission.

The Sarus blogger is finally online

2009-05-19T09:40:00.003+05:30

IMAGE: SARUS AND NILGAI (FROM K S GOPI SUNDAR'S SARUS SCAPES)

My dear friend Gopi Sundar has finally lifted the veil on his stupendous insight into bird behaviour. His blog 'Sarus Scape' is now online and abuzz. He tags his blog 'Random Observations of a Wandering Naturalist' but that entire line is a euphemism for what he does best. His observations are far from random - they are marked by extraordinary scientific precision. And though he may like to imagine himself as a peripatetic hobo, his journeys are anything but wanderings - well, if you and I marked an entire state into little squares and transected each one to document its birdlife, we wouldn't call that wandering. But my friend has a yen for understatement.

Enough said. Please enjoy Sarus Scape.

Snake

2009-05-11T19:55:00.001+05:30

The first time I brought a snake home I was seven. More ignorant than now, and more innocent.

It wasn't the warmest welcome. I gave the folks full points for maximum vocal decibel capacity.

It turned out to be a saw-scaled viper. Didn't hurt me at all. I like to think the snake must have understood that in snake years, I was younger and meant no harm.

Comeback time for the Irrawaddy Dolphin? [del.icio.us]

2009-04-03T06:22:39-07:00

Comeback time for the Irrawaddy Dolphin?

2009-04-03T18:52:00.001+05:30

The discovery of a new population of Irrawaddy Dolphins has boosted the hopes of conservationists working to protect them, reports The Observer.

Researchers attached to the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society have confirmed that they have found nearly 6,000 Irrawaddy Dolphins in the Sunderbans mangrove habitat of Bangladesh, bordering the Bay of Bengal.

The Observer report said:

Until this new Bangladesh population was found, figures from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated the Sundarbans population to be around 450.

River dolphins worldwide are threatened due to habitat destruction and trawler fishing in the large rivers of the world. The Irrawaddy Dolphin is listed as 'vulnerable' in the IUCN's Red List of endangered species.

In June 2008, I had an interesting conversation with the author Amitav Ghosh about the possibility of Irrawaddy Dolphins inhabiting the mouths of the Mandovi and Zuari rivers in Goa.

MORE

Technorati Tags: river dolphin, irrawaddy dolphin, conservation, bangladesh, sunderbans

Encounter - Black Francolin

2009-03-29T14:00:00.005+05:30

All right, shoot me. I have never had any luck with the Black Francolin. When other birders talked of it as if it were domestic poultry, I would clear my throat and look west until the conversation had drifted past.

Not any more.

Kutch offered me the best-ever sighting of this handsome fowl. The CEDO folks drove us towards the Naliya grassland and all the while we looked for the elusive bustards. This, they told us, was the habitat of the Great Indian Bustard and the MacQueen's Bustard. We combed the grassland but saw none.

But in the early morning light, as we trailed a large flock of Eurasian Griffons, we saw a movement in the shin-high grass. As our driver Mangal cut the engine, the suspect emerged from his cover and lorded over the path ahead of us for a glorious three seconds. Then he obliged us by moving into the light and showing off for a bit, completely unperturbed. Sandy, who was in the passenger seat next to the driver, fired away.

And that's how we got this picture. And that's how when the Black Francolin comes up in conversation, it's my turn to gloat.

Photograph © Sandeep Somasekharan. All rights reserved

Encounter - The Indian Desert Cat

2009-03-26T08:00:00.001+05:30

In January, the Banni grassland of Kutch rustles like a tinderbox. The tussocks of grass are dry, the soil is powdery and fine, and mirages turn the horizon into a kaleidoscope of illusions. You can, therefore, be forgiven for seeing things that do not exist here.

It is exactly this illusion that the creatures that inhabit this arid wonderland hope you will succumb to. Rub your eyes and they're gone. And so, while our Tata Sumo cross-countried through the fringes of the Great Rann of Kutch, we saw bustards that were actually common cranes, and wild asses that were anything but. After a while, we learned not to let our hearts stop at the sight of Indian gazelles (chinkaras) loping through the fawn-coloured landscape like motion grabs from Animal Planet.

And while we peeled our eyes for the endemic Desert Fox, another creature crossed our path. Felis silvestris ornatus - the Indian Desert Cat. It melted out of the stippled earth and slunk away towards its burrow, apparently borrowed from an Indian fox.

We gasped. And clicked away.

Photograph © Sandeep Somasekharan. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Unforgetting Exxon Valdez

2009-03-23T12:51:00.003+05:30

On the eve of the 20th anniversary of one of the world's great ecological catastrophes - the Exxon Valdez oil spill - The New York Times has carried a telling editorial. Excerpt:

More than $2 billion has been spent on cleanup and recovery. Exxon has paid at least $1 billion in damages. Supertankers have been made safer with double hulls, emergency teams given better equipment. Some fish species, though not all, have recovered.

Yet the Exxon Valdez still sends a powerful cautionary message: oil development, however necessary, is an inherently risky, dirty business — especially so in the forbidding waters of the Arctic.

More here

Tamil Nadu Distance Calculator, Distance Between Cities, Distance Chart (India) [del.icio.us]

2008-10-06T05:52:17-07:00

Tamil Nadu road distance calculator

The Green Ogre: Mumbai's trash flows from urban jungle to national park [del.icio.us]

2008-10-06T05:12:57-07:00

Most national parks have effete, unconvincing signboards emblazoned with some weak cliche about saving our forests. Few of them offer the real reasons why you should not travel with stuff that tends to become trash. And if you do, why you should take your trash home. Most forest department workers are not educated about this aspect in the first place, so enforcement is not even on the horizon. I once travelled on a safari in Bandipur with a bunch of engineering college students. One of them was playing music on a Walkman so loud that all of us could hear the screech of the playback singer's sibilants and the thump of jhankaar beats. I'm sure the animals heard him, too, a mile away. And, helped ably by the rattle and trundle of the diesel van that took us on the safari, we saw nothing but jungle fowl and the backside of an elephant.

What shall we tell the President? [del.icio.us]

2008-10-03T21:29:20-07:00

The Green Ogre: The best bird photographers are ethical [del.icio.us]

2008-10-03T19:44:04-07:00

With the best equipment, even a fashion photographer can photograph birds in the wild. But wildlife photographers are not merely artists and wildlife photography isn't art for art's sake. They are pilgrims in nature's great shrine, their methods are acts of prayer, and every photographic opportunity is a blessing.

The Green Ogre: A leopard, a village and a photographer's conscience [del.icio.us]

2008-10-03T19:29:58-07:00

From a respectful distance, I have always admired Kalyan Varma for his gift - the talent to tell stories and unravel mysteries through his wildlife photographs. But his coverage, in March this year, of a leopard trapped in the village of Valparai is sheer testament to the fact that this young man is no mere shutterbug collecting photographic souvenirs in our forests and trading them for awards. He is what wildlife conservation needs with utmost urgency - a wildlife photojournalist with a conscience.

The Green Ogre: Encounter - The forest for the trees [del.icio.us]

2008-10-03T19:26:33-07:00

There are times when a species introduces itself to you - sometimes ceremoniously, but often without fanfare. This is a seminal moment in the life of any naturalist or nature enthusiast. I remember one such feeling way back in 2001 - of being in the company of sage, wise elders - when I trekked in Muir Woods, about 14 miles north of San Francisco.

The Green Ogre: Encounter - The Giant Sequoia stands tall, er... large [del.icio.us]

2008-10-03T19:20:38-07:00

Though not the tallest tree in the world, the Giant Sequoia is certainly the largest. Now, that has a lot of people confused. Tallest, largest... what's the diff? There are a trees in this grove that have been around for centuries. Along with trees in other parts of the Sierra Nevada, they are some of the last Giant Sequoias left on the planet.

The Green Ogre: Talking dolphins with Amitav Ghosh [del.icio.us]

2008-10-03T19:14:41-07:00

Amitav Ghosh told me: "The sort of dolphin I wrote about in The Hungry Tide – the Irrawaddy Dolphin – is actually the dolphin that they show tourists in Goa, where at the mouth of the Mandovi river they have a breeding pod. People don’t know what kind of dolphin it is so they say it’s a porpoise!"

The Green Ogre: Encounter: Pop goes the weasel [del.icio.us]

2008-10-03T19:09:03-07:00

The Himalayan Weasel is not getting any commoner in the hills, and we were very lucky to see this guy up close. Humankind's war against nature has pushed these little carnivores to the brink. Meeting this fierce little killer in the hills, I was reminded of Strange Meeting, Wilfred Owen's telling poem on the futility of war, especially these three lines from it: I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

The Green Ogre: Paper and plastic - kicking the habit [del.icio.us]

2008-10-03T19:01:55-07:00

Only about 15 years ago I have bought milk in a steel container. And I have shopped veggies in a little cloth bag emblazoned with a kitschy reproduction of a Mughal painting. As for meat and chicken and fish, we got them wrapped in sheets of newspaper - it was morbidly comic to see the 'killed' and 'dead' so ubiquitous in our headlines clinging to the gills of mackerel or slapped to mutton ribs. Somewhere along the way, plastic took over. First, as a fad. Then, as an excuse for convenience. Now, it has become a scourge.

Polar bear faux pas gets rubber dodo for Palin [del.icio.us]

2008-09-18T22:21:19-07:00