Nature’s Layers Unravelled – Encounters with birds, beasts, and relatives
The unpresented paper In 1897 the eminent chemist Sir Henry E Roscoe, know for early studies on vanadium, presented a paper to the Linnaean Society in London on behalf of his then unknown niece, Beatrix Potter, a mycologist and gifted illustrator. Beatrix loved illustrating lichens and fungi and these detailed…
If your guide points to nothing on the bark of a tree, you can be sure you’re looking at (but not seeing) Draco dussumieri, the Southern Flying Lizard!
Caption this! Photograph: Sahastrarashmi The Green Ogre – Birds, Wildlife, Ecology and Nature notes from India.
The Hill Swallow – note the rufous throat and face ‘One swallow does not make a summer’ is part of a quote attributed to Aristotle. In truth it represents a very Eurocentric position on swallows, in this case the Barn Swallow that migrates south to India in winter. On my…
Meet the Short-toed Snake Eagle (Circaetus gallicus) or plain “Short-toed Eagle”. It is a raptor of open countries, grass/ scrublands and semi-deserts, which, as its name suggests, loves to devour snakes and reptiles and occasionally mammals as well. And yes, the toes (or talons) are shorter compared to other birds of prey.…
Cruising through the backwaters of the Sundarbans in India, Jennifer Nandi marvels at the estuarine crocodile, even as her thoughts turn to the conflict between these fascinating reptiles and the ecosystem’s human inhabitants Estuarine crocodile sunbathing in the squelchy ooze The plan for today begins with breakfast on board. Once…
Off we went, my namesake Arun and I, early Saturday morning on the Diwali weekend. Our destination – Bilikal Rangaswamy Betta, a hill in Kanakapura taluk of Bangalore Rural district. At the top of the hill is a temple but, of course, our visit was a pilgrimage of a different…
Today, January 7, is the birth anniversary of Gerald Durrell, beloved author to some, and to others a path-breaking conservationist who changed the flavour of the word ‘zoo’. I have been inspired by Durrell for most of my life, although circumstances (and a general lack of guts and initiative) have…
As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. ~ Seamus Heaney I vividly remember the first time a bore well was dug on our fields.…
A walk on the beach can yield untold treasures The beach on a wet, windswept day Most people pick seashells on the seashore, and there’s that old tongue-twirler about some old sheila selling them, too. Often, it’s the smelliest, filthiest beaches littered with landmines of human dung that offer the…
A natural portrait of an owl and a squirrel is when the latter is in the claws of the former. Owls and owlets are generally fond of rodents, and squirrels do fall under their diet regime. Strangely though, I have witnessed squirrels quite often in and around owl territories. And…
With the Sundarbans of Bangladesh behind her, Jennifer Nandi explores the Sundarbans of West Bengal, India. Political boundaries, she finds, are not the only dividing line between the two nations. Beginning her journey at Kolkata, she despairs at the atmosphere of abject neglect and callousness… It is hard to believe that…
