Nature’s Layers Unravelled – Encounters with birds, beasts, and relatives
Traveller, photographer, art connoisseur, trekking enthusiast, and master trip planner, Sahastrarashmi (SR or Sahastra to his friends) is on a relentless quest for the story of life. An engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, he lives in the former French enclave of Pondicherry.
As a photographer, he is interested in the relationship of humans to their sense of sacred. He has photographed the riverfront of Varanasi for the past 20 years and has extensively covered Kumbha Melas at Prayag and Ujjain. His work has been published in the acclaimed photo magazine, LensWork. He is on a mission to introduce the uninitiated to the glory of the Himalaya and many adventure-lovers have enjoyed their first experience of a Himalayan trek with him.
In 2002, while in Chopta (part of Kedarnath Musk Deer Sanctuary), we had tried to visit the Musk Deer Breeding Centre but were denied access. They behaved as if it were a nuclear installation, a friend who was with me then had observed. Later in August 2006 I was in…
As I enter the village children greet me. They are a cheerful lot, waving and smiling at the visitor with a camera. I notice that they are playing with a dead snake and want me to see it up close. For an armchair explorer like me, fed on a regular…
In April 2006, we trekked from the Iruppu waterfalls in Kodagu (Coorg) to the Brahmagiri peak on the Karnataka-Kerala border. After crossing the lower bamboo-dominated patches we crossed a transition zone and reached a nice shola patch at the edge of the high-altitude grassland. That’s where we saw the frog.…
A Spotbill Duck trapped for the pot in western Uttar Pradesh Amid caged quails trapped for the pot, a girl holds a Yellow-fronted Green Pigeon Text and photographs by Sahastrarashmi The Green Ogre – Birds, Wildlife, Ecology and Nature notes from India.
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…
Caption this! Photograph: Sahastrarashmi The Green Ogre – Birds, Wildlife, Ecology and Nature notes from India.
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.…
Sparrows on the wood weighing scale Sparrows dust-bathing in a boat A Blue Rock Pigeon drinks of its reflection A White-throated Kingfisher brightens the clutter Bank Mynas inspect a priest’s wares A Bank Myna surveys its domain Even paradise takes prisoners, like this parakeet Monkey business as usual – and…
One does not usually associate birding with Varanasi’s riverfront. This ancient and holy city, which is amongst the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth, is crowded, filthy, crassly commercial, oozes religiosity, garishly dressed up, loud, endlessly fascinating, photogenic, friendly, unpretentious and very often sublimely beautiful — even spiritual. Bird life…
Antlions are far more menacing as larvae: their pits are death traps for ants and small insects and can offer kids many hours of macabre entertainment
The brickmaking industry gradually converts fertile fields into sterile lands. Here’s how it’s done… Sarus Cranes take flight outside a brick kiln in Uttar Pradesh’s Rae Bareli district As a kid when I used to take a bus to go outside the village, usually to Kanpur, the brick chimneys were…
For his seventh birthday I gifted Shashwat a globe. It met a long-standing demand and soon enough he had charted the oceans, seas, continents, polar ice caps (the great melt, breaking ice shelf), the Pacific Ring of Fire (volcanoes), Polynesia (extinct flightless birds), Madagascar (the island and the movie), the…
A not-so-pale view of hills I woke up to the sound of rain pounding the tin roof of the rented shack and the remnants of a nightmare lingering on. I dreamed that the mountain looming above us has suddenly sprung a gigantic waterfall, which is nonchalantly carrying my shack to…
The Sidewinder is a rattlesnake that has adapted to life in the desert with unique sinusoidal-diagonal locomotion that enables it to negotiate smooth sand dunes with ease This post concerns a certain question asked after a storytelling session at my son’s school, though this could be any child’s question…
Posted by Sahastrarashmi On Tuesday, August 4, 2010, morning walkers on Goubert Avenue, Pondicherry, were greeted by a creature larger than most of them would ever have seen, tossing in the waves near the shore. It was a 37-feet-long Sperm Whale (Physeter macrocephalus) and it was quite dead. The visitor was…
