Tag: plantations (page 1 of 1)

6 impossible things a coffee lover can do before breakfast

1. Wake up and smell the coffee. No, not the coffee brewing in your percolator or stove-top at home, this coffee has not been a bean yet. Far sweeter, heady, finer than jasmine, it suffuses the air all around, seeps into your lungs inside, bathes you in fragrance outside. It emerges, imperceptibly, from millions of soft, white-petaled flowers packed along the branches of waist-high bushes ranging all around you under the shade of rainforest trees. A week earlier and you would have barely seen the waiting green buds clustered at leaf axils, a week later and the spent blooms would have wilted away. You arrive on exactly the right morning, a week after the first rains of summer, at the tropical coffee plantation in glorious, copious, synchronous bloom.

Arabica coffee in bloom. By Marcelo Corrêa (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

2. Listen to the morning buzz. No, this is not the artificial twitter of virtual voices flickering out of your phone or computer screens. This is the real thing: the morning chorus of birds carrying the sibilant twitter of sunbirds and white-eyes, alongside the clarion clang of racket-tailed drongos, the rhythmic metronome of barbets, and the raucous cries of great hornbills. All around sounds the delicate, pervasive hum of pollinating bees—small stingless bees, striped honey bees, giant rock bees—all living up to their clade name, anthophila, the flower lovers. Dip into the flower, sip the nectar, shrink and become the bee.

Rock bee (Apis dorsata) hive on a rainforest shade tree above a coffee estate in the Anamalai hills. By T R Shankar Raman [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

3. Share and savour a bole of fruit. The jackfruit, like disfigured, spiky footballs, hang heavy from the knobbly bole of the shade tree. A macaque has eaten a monkey’s mouthful out of one, revealing oozy white latex and pulpy yellow innards. Now, the leaves shiver behind a leaping red-black blur. Cream-faced, tuft-eared, bushy-tailed, the giant squirrel soft-lands on branch, scurries to bole. Hanging by his hind feet, he pulls a marble-sized seed wrapped in pulpy flesh to his mouth. Later the fruit could fall or be yanked down by a hungry elephant. Take a bite yourself. Savour the fruit of giants.

Jackfruit tree in copious fruiting. By A. J. T. Johnsingh, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A pair of giant squirrels tearing away at jackfruit. By Chinmayisk [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

4. Eyeball the headlines. Look up the news: for instance, about yesterday’s gathering of eminent area residents at the annual jack feast. Parallel furrows on tree bark show Sambar had stripped off a snack, just before Elephant came by after her mud bath and rubbed herself on the trunk. By night, Civet came for the rainforest fruit platter, placed a seed-studded scat on a rock as his mark of approval. Porcupine left a quill behind, unexplained. You can only surmise what the writers on this landscape are up to, or mean, by the marks they leave behind.

Indian crested porcupine. By Harsha Jayaramaiah [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

5. Clean up after. A tiny bird, small enough to hold in your fist, shows you how. The flowerpecker flits above among the mistletoes adorning tree branches like Christmas decorations. With his beak, the bird pinches the mistletoe fruit, sticky to touch, to pop the seed and wipe it off on a twig. Or he swallows it and will later have to wipe the goopy seed off his butt on a twig where the seed will grow into a future mistletoe. Biologists call this directed dispersal, but there’s something even more admirable in what the little fella does that you could emulate: don’t just wipe stuff off, regenerate what you consume.

Nilgiri flowerpecker planting a mistletoe seed. Photos by Kalyan Varma (http://kalyanvarma.net).

6. Read the coffee grounds. Open all your senses, sip your brew now: imbibe a little of the land of elephant and hornbill and civet in India, or the land of tamandua and toucan and coati in Costa Rica, or whichever tropical place made your coffee. (You didn’t think you made it yourself, did you?) Look in the cup, imagine a future where you will cherish and feel connected to lives and lands so impossibly wonderful wherever they are.

A lion-tailed macaque looks out from a rainforest tree over coffee plantations and forests in the Anamalai hills. By T. R. Shankar Raman [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

How Green is Your Tea

(With Divya Mudappa in Business Line, BLink magazine special issue on animals, 27 Sep 2014)

Gaur grazing at edge of a forest in a tea estate in the Anamalai hills.

You could have imagined you were on a forest trail. Fifty metres away, the dark hulk of a solitary bull gaur, over five feet tall at the shoulder with taut muscles and thick, curving horns, looks up from the swampy valley where he stands in his white-stockinged legs. Eyes locked with gaur, your ears pick up the harsh bark of a great hornbill resounding through the cool mountain air from a patch of tall trees on the hill slope beyond. As you skirt the gaur and walk quietly down the trail, stepping past fresh scat of a sloth bear and dropped quills of a porcupine, a stripe-necked mongoose darts across, a flash of crimson bright against background green. The green is not the multi-hued mosaic of a real forest, but a more uniform smear of a monoculture. Row upon row of neatly pruned metre-high bushes range away in tight lines, punctuated by well-spaced and heavily-lopped silver oak trees. In the mountains of the Western Ghats, at the edge of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve, you are walking through a large tea plantation.

In south India, tea is grown as extensive monocultures with sparse canopy of alien silver oak trees.

Read on here… or from magazine pages below.

…This post first appeared in the blog on the Coyotes Network on 28 September 2014 and in Business Line, BLink magazine special issue on animals, 27 Sep 2014. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.