The Green Ogre

Bellandur, the Bangalore suburb where I live, does not have piped water supply. It is an ecosystem of swank software parks, malls and hypermarkets densely clustered with high-rise apartments milling around what were traditionally villages but now degraded partially to slums and shanties. There is a huge multilevel Maruti automotive…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylDrlL2gxTI] In Los Angeles, “guerrilla gardeners” take over bald patches of public land at night and turn them into gardens of cacti and succulents. As this inspiring video shows, the gardeners are fiercely independent and know each other only by nickname. This is a very inspiring video, and the concept…

It’s as urban a lake as you can get in Bangalore but Sankey Tank in the precincts of Malleshwaram is crawling with evening walkers even at twilight. Above the shouts of children at play, other signs of life stir. A flock of domestic ducks paddles a few laps while a…

After a spell of searing heat, April thunderstorms have been cooling the city every evening. After a storm, the sky burns distantly with the remnant embers of the day.  That reminds me of two of Eliot’s verses: April is the cruellest month, breeding   Lilacs out of the dead land,…

I was brought up to be religious. When I could think for myself, I changed my view. But temples located amid forests still held a fascination for me – it was the journey, rather than the destination, that appealed to me most.  It’s been a long time since I have…

…the morning I swam with him, the Indian Ocean was like a warm bath, just the way Rajan — and I — like it. I first treaded water a few feet away, watching him step like a delicate matron into the sea. He raised his trunk to breathe as if…

The Audubon Magazine makes for fine reading. And recently, I came across this excellent guide to buying a pair of birding binoculars. Since I know that many readers of The Green Ogre are newbie birders, I thought this was worth sharing. This excerpt is sure to hook you: Many beginners…

  Against the backdrop of the friendly neighborhood, this funambulist climbed steadily into the sky, dwarfing birds and other passing aircraft. The Green Ogre – Birds, Wildlife, Ecology and Nature notes from India.

The sun went down on the first evening of 2010. The outboard motor that had growled and gnashed through the backwaters in the morning was now silent. The water lapped placidly at the speedboat’s fibre hull. A Stork-billed Kingfisher (Pelargopsis capensis) trilled absently. But for this Great Egret (Ardea alba)…

News is now afoot of a Japanese whaler plowing through a high-tech powerboat full of anti-whaling activists who hurled stink bombs to disrupt the whalers’ annual hunt in the waters off Antarctica. The trimaran Ady Gil, enlisted by Sea Shepherd activists for anti-whaling protests, is sinking in Antarctica’s Commonwealth Bay.…

Walking by the backwaters at Aronda, a coastal village near Sawantwadi in southern Maharashtra, we came upon a bush of yellow blooms shimmering with butterflies, mostly Blue Tigers (Tirumala limniace) and a few Common Crows (Euploea core). Both species are known to migrate extensively during the monsoon, and it was…

Kunwar Arjan Singh, better known to big cat-lovers as Billy Arjan Singh, stirred the conservation world to an agitated and impassioned debate when he hand-reared a tigress, Tara, procured from a breeder in England, and released her in the wilds of Tiger Haven, his estate in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri…

Over the last three weeks, the weather has been very odd in Bangalore. We had an extended spell of rain and some very wet days. And then some very warm nights — sleeping with the fan on at night in late November has certainly been a first. It’s been such…