My friend Ina Mondkar sent me this lovely (though sad) poem by Mary Oliver (who often writes about the natural world. The “Lord God” woodpecker refers to the Ivory-biiled woodpecker.
Look, children, here is the shy, flightless Dodo, the many-colored pigeon named the Passenger, the Great auk, the Eskimo curlew, the woodpecker called the Lord God Bird, the…. Come, children, hurry… there are so many more wonderful things to show you in the museum’s dark drawers!! (Mary Oliver)
In India, perhaps we would have to write a poem about coursers, bustards, and many others….
I wish many of us could visit our seniors (well, even more senior than me) and listen to their anecdotes. Today I visited a couple and here’s the anecdote: The gentleman had a group of Japanese visiting his factory. In preparation for the visit, he had asked several of his colleagues and their spouses to take a course in spoken Japanese. His own wife had a ear for languages, and she completed the next course too. During the visit, she heard the visitors talking amongst themselves and expressing concern about the chaotic traffic in Bangalore (and this was more than 30 years ago!) During the official welcome speech, which she delivered in Japanese, she said, “I know some of you are worried about the traffic in our city…please don’t worry The driver of your van is our second-best company chauffeur.” “Oh!” exclaimed a visitor, relieved. Then he added, “Where is your best driver?” “Still in the hospital”, was the reply! I enjoy meeting this couple (Rajagopalan and Lakshmi) .They have a great sense of humour and a great fund of interesting stories!
In today’s Republic Day parade at Delhi, several temples were featured, along with several cultural customs associated with religious festivals (Eg, Kamakhya temple at Guwahati).
Not a single church, mosque, gurudwara or any cultural reference from any religion other than Hinduism was featured.
I agree that the theme was Nari Shakti (Woman Power) but every religion has its female icons….their exclusion was glaringly obvious to me. I enjoyed the parade very much, as usual, but this exclusion left a bad taste.
We are not only moving into an autocracy…we are moving towards a theocracy, I think.
It seems to be the norm that a democracy slowly tends to tilt into autocracy. The very checks and balances created to prevent this are suborned to the purpose of draconian rule.
Blanket rules, and their harsh implemenation, are the hall-marks of such a decline….and the rise of corruption and bribery can be both the cause and effect of this slide into a “Thou Shalt Not” regime.
My morning walk from my daughter’s home, to mine, in sounds: The Lalita Sahasranaam playing loudly from someone’s balcony. A gate creaking as the inmate of the house sets off for the morning walk. The shrill whistle of the garbage collector and the beat of the collection van’s diesel engine. The metallic thunk, thunk, thunk of some construction workers straightening steel rods. The rattling moped crossing me, followed by the quieter hiss of an electric scooter. The shout of an ayah in a school bus, asking the parents to send the child downstairs as the bus is already late. The harsh cawing of crows, the troo-troo of barbets, and the liquid, burbling call of the bulbul. The cheerful “Hello, Akka!” from my maid Lakshmi, as she rushes to drop her children at school.(Her husband usually does this, but he’s out of town. I mentally note that she’s going to be late for work.) The haunting singsong call of a knife- sharpener. The words are quite unintelligible with years of calling. A neighbour calling out instructions to her spouse as she rushes to work. My own footsteps on the stairs. (Part of my routine is to use the stairs unless I have too much to carry or am very tired.) The click of my key in the door… and I am home.
Balaji, Carmel, Gayatri, Shalini. FD Guards Eswaran, Mahavishnu. RFO Murugesan. (We met Sri Govindaswamy at Dargah Lake). We were allocated Vanammal Lake (Jawalagiri) and Dargah Lake (Denkanikotta)
Pied Cuckoo, an unusual sighting for this time of year
Green Bee-eater “tossing” its catch
Temple under the tree
Crested Serpent Eagle
Purple Sunbird on the mirror of a two-wheeler
Blue Pimpernel (Lysimachia foemina), Denkanikotta …in front of the toilet at a petrol pump where we stopped.
We have a saying in Tamizh, குடியானவன் சேத்துல கால வெச்சா தான் நம்ப சோத்துல கைய வெக்க முடியும். (Only if the farmer puts his foot in the mud can we put our hand in our food…the rice that the farmer grows in the paddyfield). Here is one such farmer:
Two fun signs I noticed
With Sri Murugesan and Sri Mahavishnu at Dargah Lake (Sri Govindaswamy on the extreme right)
Little Egret in breeding plumage
The Dargah which gives Dargah Lake its name
Interacting with Sri Murugesan, Range Forest Officer, Denkanikotta:
My morning walk from my daughter’s home, to mine, in sounds:
The Lalita Sahasranaam playing loudly from someone’s balcony.
A gate creaking as the inmate of the house sets off for the morning walk.
The shrill whistle of the garbage collector and the beat of the collection van’s diesel engine.
The metallic thunk, thunk, thunk of some construction workers straightening steel rods.
The rattling moped crossing me, followed by the quieter hiss of an electric scooter.
The shout of an ayah in a school bus, asking the parents to send the child downstairs as the bus is already late.
The harsh cawing of crows, the troo-troo of barbets, and the liquid, burbling call of the bulbul.
The cheerful “Hello, Akka!” from my maid Lakshmi, as she rushes to drop her children at school.(Her husband usually does this, but he’s out of town. I mentally note that she’s going to be late for work.)
The haunting singsong call of a knife- sharpener. The words are quite unintelligible with years of calling.
A neighbour calling out instructions to her spouse as she rushes to work.
My own footsteps on the stairs. (Part of my routine is to use the stairs unless I have too much to carry or am very tired.)
Four of us…Debankur Biswas, Ravindra and Supriya Kulkarni…went to Jayamangali Blackbuck Sanctuary, staying overnight at Madhugiri. I was thrilled to realize that the others were visiting this grassland for the very first time, and indeed, each time they sighted a bird, or even enjoyed the landscape, it took me back to my own first visit, and gave me the joy once again. Our visit was very productive (in terms of birds, this can be seen from the eBird trip report at https://ebird.org/tripreport/103012 (111 sp). We saw many Blackbuck stags, does and fauns too, and the occasional Mongoose ran across our path; we could not see any foxes or jackals, and I was rather surprised by the low number of Harriers that we saw. Of course, one flew just a few feet overhead when all of us were eating a few snacks at the watchtower, and not even I had a camera in my hands! However, all this must be quite familiar to those of you who have visited the Blackbuck Sanctuary…so I’d like to share a sighting which was certainly unexpected, and which, Ashwin says, has not been reported from Jayamangali before.
We were driving very slowly along the path when Deb suddenly halted and pointed to a Sandgrouse which was so well camouflaged in the undergrowth that it took me a few minutes to spot it. “How did you spot it, that, too, while driving?” I asked him. His reply was, “It moved from the path of my tyre, so I saw it. It just froze right next to the path.”
After looking at it carefully from inside the car, we slowly emerged and were able to photograph the perfectly still bird….I call it the “almost-tyred bird” since it had almost come under the tyre of our car, and seemed too tired to move.
When we moved to get back into the car, with the usual noisy flapping of wings, the bird took off…accompanied by another, which, in spite of being so near it, we had completely failed to spot, so well hidden was it, in the grass! As usual, we were startled, and then thrilled to see the two disappearing forms. Talk about effective camouflage! We had seen eight Chestnut-tailed Sandgrouse in flight the previous day, and since only that bird has been seen in the sanctuary area, we assumed these two were the same bird.
Both Supriya and I felt that there was “something different” about the bird, and I did feel that this was a different bird. I was too ill by the time I returned to do more than caption my photos and post it to my album in Flickr. Supriya persisted in saying that the “eye was different” but I lacked the energy to follow up on my suspicion too.
But, just to prove that our experts are experts for a reason, Ashwin followed it up! He saw my photograph and immediately messaged me that the bird was a Painted Sandgrouse, (the markings on the head and around the eye are indeed different) which has not been reported from Jayamangali before this. Certainly this upped our HQ…Happiness Quotient. I am appending a photo of the Painted Sandgrouse (female) from the Jayamangali Blackbuck Reserve, taken on 22 Jan ’23. So friends..when you visit the Blackbuck Reserve….you have one more bird to look out for!
We are not all expert enough to find new species of birds like the dedicated band which went to the remote wilds of Arunachal and sighted one:
But for us, getting a new bird in a known location is thrill enough, adding to the happiness of seeing so many birds over two visits to the Blackbuck Sanctuary. A very rewarding visit indeed! I suppose this is not the scientific, erudite “write-up” of a new bird-sighting, but I prefer to make a nice anecdote of it.
Deponti to the world 