Nature’s Layers Unravelled – Encounters with birds, beasts, and relatives
All posts authored by Sahastra
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…
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…
The Baobab trees of Pondicherry were lost in time and rediscovered in the 13-acre forest patch inside the now defunct Swadeshi Cotton Mill Complex
