Pallikaranai picture parade

All Photos by Mr Ramanan, in this post! He has been busy, catching all the avian stars of Pallikaranai.

The stilts stood in repose

Striking a haiku-like pose.

Black winged stilts

But the spot-billed ducks were swimming purposefully

In a line, so disciplinedly.


Spot-billed ducks

The grebes and coots were all a-chatter

Wondering whatever was the matter.

A congregation of Grebes

A group of Coots

"Look at me!", chirped this one,

"I'm in breeding plumage, isn't it fun?!"

Little Grebe in breeding plumage

"Huh, so what?", grumbled this comb duck

"So am I, but have had no luck.

No mate have I found

in this blessed pond."

Male comb duck, seen at Bharatpur

"Its not a pond, its a wetland

And you wouldn't understand

The joys of solitude, but I can",

said this frequently solitary pelican.

Spot-billed pelican, with a swallow in the foreground, and a little grebe in the background

The swallows swooped so swift,

But this grey heron looked miffed.

The roars of the cars on the road nearby

made him cross and ready to fly by.


Purple heron

This coot wasn't crazy

just a trifle lazy,

It stood on the water's edge,

looking at the water so hazy.

With all this sewage and garbage

Its a wonder its able to forage.

Common Coot (Nama kozhi in Tamil)

The purple moorhen bowed and strutted

and to his lady love, clucked and hooted.

With weeds in his bill he chuckled,

And under his courtship, she buckled!

Purple moorhen
Pheasant-tailed jacana

Up and down the jacana goes

walking on his spidery toes,

"When will my tail appear,

oh will it never, that I fear.

Oh blimey, oh banana,

then I will not be a pheasant-tailed jacana!"

Pheasant-tailed jacana

When you do grow your tail, Mr Jacana,

Mr Ramanan will be there with his camera.

Then make sure you strike him a good pose

So I may salute you with poetry, not prose.

Tell all your feathered friends in the marsh

On us, please dont be too harsh.

We've made a mess

that I confess

But we'll try our best

to reverse the process

and make your homes green once again.

***********

Pallikaranai is the marshy wetland, now very much a part of the city of Madras, encroached upon by development, and spoiled by garbage disposal.

Insectopia!

I have been overcome by a lethargy and inertia, as far as blogging goes, my excuse for the long hiatus.

But this beauty that I received from Mr Ramanan was just the stimulus I needed. Isn't it beautiful? Its called a Common lime butterfly, and you can see how it looks when basking, with open wings, here.

He found it outside his window! Its quite amazing what one sees outside the window, even in our cities.

Common lime butterfly - Photo by Mr Ramanan

Its called a Common lime because its host plant (where it lays eggs) are usually of the citrus family.

And then we saw this lovely Crimson Rose as it rested in my parents' home!

Crimson Rose
Crimson Rose, with the red body. The Mormon also mimics this butterfly, but its the red body which tells me that this is the real Crimson Rose, and is poisonous.

....And I saw these nice juicy caterpillars at the PWD tree park...the one where I saw the argiope, remember?

Its the Common or Lemon Emigrant caterpillars, all, in different stages - the initial little black one, then the all green and then the large geen one with a stripe!

I wonder where it migrates to or from? The butterfly looks a piece of lemon yellow paper! And its host is the Cassia species, and I did find them on a Cassia fistula sapling!

Do you see the large painted grasshopper on the plant below?
We saw these on the roadside, in Thoraipakkam on a Calatropis plant! There were dozens of them, all over the plant! They feed on this poisonous plant and become poisonous themselves, so the birds leave them alone.

The grasshopper and Crimson Rose are taken on my Sony Ericcson K 750i phone. while the caterpillars were shot with the Cybershot.

My camera and binoculars...(I salute you, inventors), what would I do without them?

Update - 25th Oct 2009

The common lime - at Adyar Poonga

The same common lime - they were all over the Poonga campus

A female common mormon butterfly - seen at my parents'. Check out the similarity to the Crimson Rose that it is imitating. But notice the differences - the black body, and the two white markings lower down!