The Green Ogre

With the death, by Sting Ray stinging, of Steve Irwin in 2006, couch potatoes lost a beloved star prankster. The natural world, to its immense relief, lost a bothersome pest. And naturalists, most of them wallflowers who shied away from television cameras, must have smiled smugly at the warming absence…

Six birders – some green, some brown, others a primed yellow – made a trek to the Garhwal Himalaya in April 2007. I, who used to consider myself one of the primed yellow category, found myself so clueless at times that I became a birder of many colours. An account…

(Image: copyright BBC) Wonderful news for cat lovers. If you like cats of all sizes, that is. Camera traps have revealed the presence of the rare Bornean clouded leopard in Sebangua National Park, an area where the animals not been recorded before. This is particularly exciting given that recent studies…

Here’s an endearing portrait of that wonderful, little known and oft-misunderstood fatso of the Arctic pack ice known as the Walrus. Natalie Angier in NYT: In the public pantheon of marine mammaldom, dolphins are adored, whales revered, and seal pups make old Bond girls swoon. But walruses remain perversely, lumpishly…

Envy is a dish best served lukewarm. And it is with immeasurable helpings of that emotion that I serve you Gopi Sundar’s fantastic photographic essay on a birding trip to see North American warblers in springtime. The good news is that Gopi is back in India. The bad news is…

If zoos are meant to aid conservation, this is certainly NOT how they should go about it. Kindness and compassion are one thing, but wholly different (though not exclusive) from scientific approaches. Consider this dilemma: If you had all but one motherless baby red panda in the world with a…

Chanced upon this very disturbing and heartbreaking story via Truemors. It’s published in MSNBC and is available at this link Both pollution and global warming are being blamed. No Happy Feet on the Beaches of Rio via Truemors by Colby on 7/19/08 Penguins washing ashore in Brazil from Antarctica is…

Could the ‘porpoises’ that cruise operators show off in Goa’s Mandovi and Zuari estuaries be Irrawaddy River Dolphins? Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh thinks so. His argument is compelling… The author Amitav Ghosh in conversation with me, then short-haired and propah. Photo © Rediff.com – All rights reserved.  I met Amitav Ghosh for a…

I posted this on another blog in 2002: In 1999, as an intern training at the editorial office of The Week in Kochi, I came to be known as the Birdman thanks to a feature on Kashmir’s Dal Lake that I had to rewrite. I peppered the piece with pintails,…

I don’t need some weatherman or futurist or god-man/-woman/-child/-dog/-goat to tell me this – the world’s becoming a stormier, waterlogged, windswept, cyclone-battered, quake-shaken, tsunami-marooned place. My grandmom’s been saying it for decades. This, after all, is the age of Kali – the oft-quoted, always underestimated Kalyug. Where floods are just…

The July 19 issue of Tehelka carries a piece on the damming activity in the upper reaches of the Ganga. An excerpt: India has 4,500 large dams. Until recently, the pristine stretch between Uttarkashi and Gangotri boasted of only one: Maneri Bhali Phase I. But a series of consecutive hydro-electric…

…the towers will play!via an Internet forward (source unknown) The Green Ogre – Birds, Wildlife, Ecology and Nature notes from India.

Just when the worst was being said about biofuels, here’s a form of energy that will turn heads. And maybe more. Consider this excerpt from The New Yorker story: For the past decade or so, Samsø has been the site of an unlikely social movement. When it began, in the…

Marlon Brando once said, “The only reason I’m here in Hollywood is because I don’t have the moral courage to refuse the money.” For the last three years and seven months, I have done pretty much the same thing. Followed the money. The tax-deducted money. The security of salary and…

We can solve the climate crisis, says WE. It’s an excellent campaign, and from an online advertising perspective, supported by some excellent creative. How effective it can be depends on us, or is it WE? More The Green Ogre – Birds, Wildlife, Ecology and Nature notes from India.