Oceans and coasts Archives • View from Elephant Hills

17 August 2012 / 0 Comments

Turning the turtle

At the edge of the foaming sea, behind the spent waves on the beach, shapes materialize in the night. They are ancient shapes that have appeared countless times over millions of years. They slowly pulse towards the shore, their domed shells barely showing at the surface. Under a waning gibbous moon, scaly flippers strike the sand. Wrinkled necks emerge, stretching beaked heads with unblinking eyes to survey the beach. Like time travellers from some primeval epoch, a great wave of sea turtles has arrived on the land.

Mass nesting: Olive ridley sea turtles arrive to nest on the beaches along India’s East coast (Photo: Bivash Pandav).
Turtle tracks on the sand (Photo: Kartik Shanker).
Back to the sea (Photo: Kalyan Varma).
A sea turtle at her nest on the beach (Photo: Kalyan Varma).
Finishing touches (Photo: Kalyan Varma).
The inscrutable visage (Photo: Kalyan Varma).
Lights that illuminate and confuse (Photo: Kalyan Varma).
A hatchling emerges into the light (Photo: Kalyan Varma).
Hatchlings cluster against a flashlight (Photo: Bivash Pandav).
Turtles at a nesting beach (Photo: Bivash Pandav).

… This post first appeared in the NCF blog EcoLogic on 17 August 2012. Read more in The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

20 April 2012 / 0 Comments

Being with dolphins

There is a dark sea above and a dark sea below. With one I am transfixed, with the other forever moving. Above, the arched firmament is smeared with galactic grey and sprinkled with silver brilliance of stars uncounted. Below, a fathomless depth hides under a smooth lustre, crested with white ribbons of surf and the luminescent wake of our passage.

And there is, with the wind, the gentle wind, tugging at my t-shirt, sifting through my hair, my eyes, eyelashes, over my hands and my legs, sighing in my ears, a light swell on which the boat rises, and a moment poised on a vertex of consciousness, filled with being.

In boundless seas, I am transfixed, I am moving, I am.

Photo: Kalyan Varma
Photo: Kalyan Varma
Photo: Kalyan Varma

Spinner dolphins (Video: NCF)

Spinner dolphins video by Kalyan Varma

… This post first appeared under the title ‘Dancing with Dolphins’ in The Hindu Sunday Magazine on 13 March 2012 and on the NCF blog, EcoLogic, on 20 April 2012. Read more in The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

27 January 2012 / 0 Comments

Forest of the Aliens

Like the proboscis of a malarial mosquito the Andaman Trunk Road pierces the Jarawa forest. The road carries a steady stream of vehicles, bunched into convoys with guards. By the road are heaps of stones and the claw marks of heavy machinery: the road will soon be wider.

Just beyond, on either side, stretches the home of the Jarawa—lofty rainforests with tall dipterocarps and padauk, myriad trees and lianas, palms, cane, and bamboo. If the forest bears the human mark of the Jarawa, it is subtle and difficult to discern.

A convoy of vehicles on the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR).
The forest of the Jarawa…
Dollarbird on the lookout from a leafless Tetrameles branch.
The Andaman Trunk Road brooks no obstruction… and hurtles on…
Huge rainforest trees cut for timber lying beside the Andaman Trunk Road.
Ghosts of trees past: the mounds in logged forest…
A coastal mangrove with its aerial roots: holding on to land, only to be cleared for a resort’s ‘sea view’?