Of crows and tigers - a tale from GNP

October 5th 2008:

Morning Guindy National park with MNS.

Through the southern entrance, rather than the western entrance which we used last time.

And we see tigers - hundreds of them, blue ones!  

Well that's what some one in their infinite wisdom named these butterflies - Blue Tigers.  Why? There's nothing tiger looking about them.  Strange.

There were also Glassy Tigers in plenty, and GNP for me was transformed by these lovely butterflies flitting from branch to branch and tree to tree, all over the park.

The Common India Crow is what this lovely brown butterfly is called.  Common, I can understand, but crow?!

I learnt that its the butterfly season, and I just soaked in the sight of all these butterflies, and the fragrance of the Divi divi flowers, which they all seemed to love.

There were little Pierrots (those small white butterflies) and the Common Grass yellow (little yellow ones) as well.  And though the white-browed bulbuls called noisily, the koels sang and the parakeets screeched, it was a butterfly morning for me.

Sekar found these lovely blooms of the Sickle Bush. Dichrostachys cinerea - a small tree with these interesting yellow and pink flowers.  Strangely, these vivid colours did not seem to attract the butterflies, or was I just imagining? 
And the Pink Cassia blooms filled the tree.  There are so many Cassia types aren't there?  

The weaver ants were busy as well...  Check out the Wikipedia entry on Weaver Ants - their nest building, or should I stay stitching, is quite fascinating.  I remember we saw one of these at close quarters at Penchalakona, and the ants themselves are large and menacingly red.

A weaver ant nest I think
Bhanu was very excited on seeing these yellow flowers - and muttered (more to herself I think) that this was Gmelina asiatica, a herb with lots of uses I think.  Some googling revealed that this was also called the Asian Bushbeech and mulkumizh in Tamil.  I hope I'm right!

More tigers!  As is evident, I coudn't get enough of them!

The tree is called Inky maram - because the make a dye/ink from it!