Encounter – The Mighty Chaukhamba
At 7,138 m, the Chaukhamba massif is huge and cold. The permanent layer of snow on it influences local weather and explains the shroud of clouds around it.
Category: Encounter
There’s always a first time. The Green Ogre’s ‘Encounter’ series describes memorable first meetings with birds, beasts, places, natural monuments and natural phenomena.
Encounter: Russet Sparrow
Like thousands of coins jingling in hundreds of fists, the chirruping of sparrows heralds dusk. Trees quiver as roosting flocks fuss like train passengers arguing over berths. The din dies down with the fading light and all is quiet again. Until the morning, when breakfast squabbles are made public and…
Encounter – The Himalayan Monal
Even a peacock must bow to this unchallenged monarch of mountain fowls, the majestic Himalayan Monal
Encounter – White-eared Bulbul
A prim little bulbul that’s completely at home in the desert In Horse With No Name, Neil Young sang: “In the desert, you can’t remember your name.” It’s sort of what you feel when you see a bulbul in the desert, comfortable among the spare vegetation. Meet the White-eared Bulbul,…
Encounter – White-browed Bulbul
It makes itself scarce. Its call is so enmeshed in the thickets and brambles of forest undergrowth that it is part of the sound you take back with you from the jungle. But few first-time birders I have escorted on their maiden outing have come away after a good look…
Encounter: Chinkara or Indian Gazelle
The Chinkara or Indian Gazelle (Gazella bennettii), more of a newsmaker for its association with a trigger-happy Salman Khan, is a sight to behold in the arid wilderness of Rajasthan and Kutch
Encounter: The Indian Desert Jird
The Indian Desert Jird, a diurnal rodent, lives in huge colonies and is a great food source for desert cats, jungle cats, jackals, mongooses and raptors.
Encounter – Black Francolin
All right, shoot me. I have never had any luck with the Black Francolin.
Encounter – The Indian Desert Cat
Meet a shy and secretive felid of the Indian deserts In January, the Banni grassland of Kutch rustles like a tinderbox. The tussocks of grass are dry, the soil is powdery and fine, and mirages turn the horizon into a kaleidoscope of illusions. You can, therefore, be forgiven for…
Encounter – Indian Black Eagle
To the Soliga people, the Indian Black Eagle is known by the evocative name of kaanana katthalu – the darkness of the forest The Mighty Black. For most of my birding career, this majestic forest raptor has been elusive. My first sighting of the Indian Black Eagle (Ictinaetus malayensis) was…
Encounter: The insectivorous Pitcher Plant
If Ram Gopal Varma had imagination, he’d make a movie on insectivorous Pitcher plants. One helluva motion picture, that’d be
Encounter: The Brain Fever bird
When I was a child, the Brain Fever Bird was one of my mystery birds. Its plaintive call, rising to a feverish crescendo, kept me awake on many moonlit nights. I was to encounter the bird again, and again, and again, and each time the story wedged itself deeper in my imagination
Encounter: Malabar Whistling Thrush
Sálim Ali didn’t call it the Idle Schoolboy for nothing. If, uninitiated, you hear its song in a damp nook of the forest, you may be pardoned for suspecting the presence of spirits, or maybe goat-hoofed Pan playing his merry pipes. The call is eerily like human whistling, so much…
Encounter – Changeable Hawk Eagle
What’s so changeable about this forest eagle, you may ask. The answer has more than one context. I cannot talk about the Changeable Hawk Eagle with laypersons without encountering that most pedestrian and wearying of questions: “What hawk eagle?” For your benefit, I say again: Changeable. One that is…
Encounter: Pop goes the weasel
In spring of 2001, my good friends Bruce Lee Mani and Rajeev Rajagopal (better known as guitar player and drummer, respectively, of Thermal And A Quarter) dragged me to the Himalayas on a trek for which I was quite unprepared. Bass player Rzhude, who had been there and done that…