Tag: forests (page 1 of 1)

25 August 2017 / 0 Comments

The mistletoe bird

It is one of those little plants that you hardly notice in the rainforest. It perches on tree branches, like a sea fan on a coral boulder, like a Christmas decoration. At a glance, it seems like another tassel of twigs and leaves emerging from the tree. But look closer and you see that its leaves are smaller and a paler green, tinged with coppery yellow, unlike the tree’s longer, parrot-green leaves. On the tree’s brown branch powdered with white lichen, the little plant arises out of a swollen bulb-like base, holding out dark brown twigs dusted with white spots, like chocolate sprinkled with sugar. Clusters of pinkish-red berries and buds line the smaller plant’s twigs, on the tree bereft of fruit or bud.

The clutch of leaves, berries, and flowers are on the tree, but are not of the tree itself. The little plant is an epiphyte: a plant that grows on other plants. It is a mistletoe.

In the company of mistletoes lives an unassuming little bird that you hardly notice in the rainforest.

  • Small enough to hide behind a leaf, a Plain Flowerpecker, in Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram
  • Pale-billed Flowerpecker with a fruit of the Singapore cherry Muntingia calabura in southern India.
  • Nilgiri flowerpecker planting a mistletoe seed. Photos by Kalyan Varma (http://kalyanvarma.net).
  • Plain flowerpecker with a mistletoe fruit in Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram.

…Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild. An edited version of this article appeared on 19 August 2017 on Scroll.in. It appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 25 August 2017.

18 February 2015 / 0 Comments

Blowin’ in the Wind — II

From a boat on Assam’s Deepor Beel—the freshwater lake lying south-west of Guwahati, the largest city in India’s northeast—you can look east past thousands of waterbirds and a carpet of floating leaves to see the city’s seething, smoking garbage dump. Under spotless blue skies, a thin brown haze blankets the lake from fringing forest to quarried hillock, from skirting township to the Boragaon dumpyard. As another dump truck lurches to a halt and tips its load of filth over, an unruly mob of Black Kites and a cloud of dark mynas explode from the murky earth flapping like pieces of tattered cloth caught in a gust. The truck deposits another mound of unsegregated waste—a fraction of the more than 600 tons generated daily from the city of nearly a million people—all plastic and putrefaction, chicken heads and pigs entrails, street dirt and kitchen waste, broken glass and soiled cloth, bulbs and batteries and wires and electronics and metal and paper and more. Beside the truck waits a line of people: women, adolescents, and children. And behind them, a phalanx of Greater Adjutant storks—tall, ungainly birds with dagger-like beaks and naked yellow and pink necks—awaits its turn.

  • At the Boragaon garbage dump near Deepor Beel, Assam (Photo: Jaydev Mandal)
  • The people go first, the stork waits (Photo: P. Jeganathan)
  • Greater Adjutant stork with black kite in distance (Photo: Jaydev Mandal)
  • The floating leaves that carpet Deepor Beel (Photo: Divya Mudappa)
  • Elephant killed by train (Photo: A. Christy Williams)
  • Ducks and geese in flight over Deepor Beel, Assam (Photo: Divya Mudappa)
  • A Greater Adjutant descends from the skies (Photo: P. Jeganathan)
  • Dusk at Deepor beel (Photo: Jaydev Mandal)

…Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

Bob Dylan, Blowin’ in the Wind

This piece follows an earlier post, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.

… This post appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 18 February 2015. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

9 December 2014 / 0 Comments

Kalakad: Three Years in Rainforest

(With Divya Mudappa, for a volume commemorating 25 years of Kalakad – Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve)

A place that is marked by the presence of people is not unusual, but a place whose presence itself leaves an indelible mark on people is something extraordinary. In the ancient mountains at the southern tip of the great Western Ghats ranges, sheltering among rocky peaks and rugged slopes draped with tall evergreen forest, lies one such place. A place of beauty and challenge and diversity, which if you have really experienced, you will declare has no real equivalent. And if you have lived and worked there, wherever you go, the place will go with you. It will remain a benchmark, a touchstone, a reference point in felt memory and field experience, against which you will forever measure other places, newer knowledge. A place that does all this, slowly, gently, but inevitably, is Kalakad – Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve.

  • Photo: P. Jeganathan (19 March 1999)
  • Canarium flush (Photo: Arati Kumar-Rao)
  • Malabar Trogon (Photo: Kalyan Varma)
  • Civet scat with Diospyros seeds
  • Bischofia javanica seedlings in the nursery
  • Photo: Kalyan Varma

… This post appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 9 December 2014. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

8 October 2014 / 0 Comments

The Walk that Spun the World

It starts as a walk in a forest in Vermont, which takes me, strangely enough, into the high Himalaya. On a balmy July afternoon, with hesitant clouds massing out west, I set out on foot down the road that passes through the village of Craftsbury Common, Vermont. I leave behind the public library and the silent church whose spire towers over the open meadow of the commons and the white clapboard houses in the village. Ahead, the forest appears, flushed green and dense and dark from summer rains. Open fields, loon lakes, and lush farms adorn the landscape, but it is the tranquil forest that entices me in. Almost involuntarily, I am drawn into the woods, up the winding trail that disappears into darkness.

  • Photo by M. D. Madhusudan
  • Photo by M. D. Madhusudan

… This post appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 28 October 2014. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

14 August 2014 / 0 Comments

Madagascar Essays

Two essays of mine based on field experiences in the island of Madagascar appeared recently. In these, I write about lemurs, tourism, conservation, and restoration of rainforests in the island. Here are a couple of teaser extracts and links to the essays.

Black and white ruffed lemur in Ranomafana

From ‘Madagascar, Through the Looking Glass’ that appeared in EarthLines in March:

Where are the other trees in the countryside, he wonders? They see only a single palm tree during the drive and stop to photograph it. A few mango trees, Chinese guava, and that is all. Everything else is eucalyptus or wattle or pine. He feels something deep and significant is missing but cannot put his finger on it. Is it the absence of the great forests and other trees that were here once? The missing lemurs, even the giants, and the birds, like the elephant bird Aepyornis maximus – the mythical roc? Is it them? Were they even here, a millenium, two millenia ago? What was here then? He does not know. Does anybody know, he wonders. There appears no trace, no trace at all that he can see or sense, no memory of the past, of life before loss. He has never before seen an entire landscape that has lost its memory.

Read the full piece here: PDF (1.1 MB).

Indri in the forests of Andasibe

From ‘The Call of the Indri’ appearing in this month’s issue of Fountain Ink:

The smallest primate in the world is a lemur. At 30 grams, Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur is just a tad heavier than a sparrow. Imagine a miniature tennis ball, covered in a soft pelt of brown and cinnamon and creamy white, which has sprouted delicate limbs and clasping hands, a long furry tail, and a little head that turns to look at you through large, lustrous eyes. Like all other lemurs—including the iconic ring-tailed lemur, the aye-aye and sifakas, dwarf lemurs and sportive lemurs—this lemur’s natural range is confined within the island of Madagascar. The largest living lemur in Madagascar is the indri. At seven kilograms, the indri weighs as much as a healthy, six-month-old human infant. But instead of a crawling or bawling child, imagine a wild primate, dressed in striking black-and-white, capable of prodigious leaps from tree to tree and endowed with an incredibly loud and mesmerising singing voice.

In October 2012, one month before our visit to Madagascar, Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur and the indri, along with four other lemur species, were listed among the world’s 25 most endangered primate species. … All lemurs larger than the indri are already extinct.

Read the full article here.

7 March 2014 / 0 Comments

March Essays

EarthLines March 2014 cover

Two of my essays appear in print this month in two relatively new magazines that have been around for a couple of years.

One essay titled ‘Madagascar, Through the Looking Glass’, appears in the March 2014 issue of EarthLines, a magazine of nature and place-based writing published thrice a year from the UK. EarthLines is an artfully produced magazine and I was glad my piece finds place in the March 2014 issue.

The EarthLines essay is part of a longer work by the same name, which I am working on, themed on life and loss, rapture and revival in the island. It is based on a trip that Divya and I made to Madagascar in November 2012. A few of our images of lemurs and reptiles from Ranomafana accompany the EarthLines piece.

Black and white ruffed lemur in Ranomafana

The other essay appearing this month is on wildlife in the heart of India, the land of deer and tiger in the forests of Central India. This appears in the March 2014 issue of Fountain Ink, a monthly carrying long-form writing, narrative journalism, and photo essays, published from Chennai, India. Fountain Ink is an attractive small-format magazine that fits like a delectable little book in your hand. The article carries some of our photos and those of Kalyan Varma from Kanha and Bandhavgarh and you can read the full text here.

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