Chilika – Jewel of Odisha

Chilika - Jewel Of Odisha from Conservation India on Vimeo.

The GBBC in Chennai

Rare sightings liven up bird count

P. Oppili

Ashy Minivet

The ashy minivet that was spotted at Theosophical Society and a huge flock of Pacific golden plovers seen at the Adyar estuary were the two rare sightings during the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) in the city this year.

The count, a four-day event, was taken up across the State from Friday. Naturalists, bird watchers and ornithologists participated in the event.

In Chennai, members of the Madras Naturalists’ Society (MNS) formed eight groups and visited places such as Siruthavoor, Adyar Estuary, Perumbakkam marsh, Pulicat lake, Kelambakkam backwaters, Guindy National Park, IIT-M campus, Navalur lake, Manimangalam lake, Theosophical Society, and Annamalaicherry and recorded the presence of various species.

According to Gnanaskandan of MNS, more birds were spotted this year due to an increase in the number of participants.

In fact, Tamil Nadu State topped the list in the sighting of maximum number of birds during the count.

The State recorded sightings of 227 species, Mr. Gnanaskandan told The Hindu . The count is an annual event.

On the first two days, the birders recorded the birds in their backyard. Some of them even counted the number of birds found in their backyard, he said.

The count would continue on Monday.

The bird count is mainly taken up to check the distribution of birds and also to monitor global population trends.

Compared to last year, the number of sightings of wetland species has come down.

But overall, the bird sightings this year have gone up by a considerable number, he added.

Two kingfishers

A flash of blue
And they were gone.

The Statesman: COUNTRY NOTEBOOK

The Statesman: COUNTRY NOTEBOOK

Puff ball
~ m krishnan

PUNDITS have been puzzled by the lora’s taxonomical position, whether to place it with the bulbuls or with the orioles or in a class by itself, but no one has ever doubted that it is one of the most charming of our garden birds. In the breeding season the dapper little cock wears a vivid livery of black and yellow — the hen is on less attractive, all the year round, in green and yellow. The cock has a variety of loud, clear calls, some of them remarkably like a human whistle, and its courtship display is justly celebrated. It shoots up into the air and then descends on slow wings – “all at once the long, white downy plumes that keep its ribs warm will start out on each side, then, like a white puff ball dashed with black and gold, it will slowly descend, quivering and glittering in the rays of the morning sun”.
However, it is of the nest and the hen that I write. Let me quote “Eha” again, on the nest. “A beautiful piece of work, a little cup, the size of a small after-dinner coffee cup, compactly woven of fine fibres and bound all round on the outside with white cob-webs.” It is as dainty and almost as white as the best china, but of course it is much lighter, being made of fibres and gauzy cobweb, not heavy clay.
In September this year I found a lora’s nest in a mango tree, some 13 feet from the ground and in the ultimate fork of the lowest bough. The only way to get on terms with the nest, for photography, was to build a machan-hide beside it on four stout poles, but I had no time for elaborate constructions and so used a packing case on top of a stool, which gave me almost an eye-level view when I stood upright upon it. However, there were difficulties. The cock, which took the afternoon sessions at the nest, would not come anywhere near while the undisguised photographer stood by. But the hen, which covered the eggs during the forenoon and at night, was a close sitter and was prepared to suffer my proximity, so long as I kept quite still and had a dark-khaki bush-shirt over by head.
There were other difficulties. The tall library-stool and rickety legs, the packing-case had very limited stability and I weigh close on 160 lb — a combination of circumstances ill suited to one another. In fact, in the attempt to rise gradually on my toes so as to get the lens level with the nest, I came down precipitately, but after assuring myself that both camera and self were whole, I learnt the excruciating trick of the feat. Throughout the hen lora sat tight, indifferent to my ludicrous fall. Its only response to my nearness was to turn in the nest so as rudely to present its tail to me, however, I shifted the stool and altered my angle of approach.
You should have heard the hen calling to its mate, which keeps within hearing distance, when it was the cock’s turn to take over — a torrent of quick, musical notes that seemed, to the human ear, to be fired with impatience. This call was also used when the hen, returning to the nest spotted me on my precarious packing case, head and camera bowed and the sweat running in a steady trickle down my chin. The temptation to look up at the bird was great, but very soon I learned the wisdom of wanting till it was well settled in the nest before raising the camera.
On the evening of 14 September there was a sudden downpour. A friend wondered how the little bird and the frail, exposed nest could survive the drenching. Later in the night, the rain changed to an exquisitely fine drizzle and a cold wind set in. At 10 pm I visited the nest, with the paraphernalia for flash photography. The next gleamed whiter than ever in the beam of my torch, but where was the bird? I mounted the packing-case and gradually stood up — and saw a remarkable sight. A soft deep pile of white topped the next, like a roof of silk-cotton — that was the hen covering the eggs, so lost in the fluffed out down that no trace of head or wing or recognizable bird feature could be seen. After taking my photograph I climbed down, but accidentally touched the bough in my clumsiness.
At once the lid of fluff rose up till it was a ball of fluff with just a tiny bird-face visible on top, then slowly the down-feathers subsided till the lora was recognisable as a bird, though still much puffed out. Then it hopped on to a twig above the nest, puffed itself out again till it was once more a ball of fluff and went to sleep. The head and feet, and even the twig beneath the feet, were completely lost in the down, and the bird looked like a larger, puff-ball nest above the cup-nest in the fork that held the eggs.
I retired quietly hoping the bird would return to its nest with my departure. At 1 am when I furtively revisited the nest, the puff-ball was still on the twig above the fork and I took a photograph. The fine drizzle had stopped, but it was quite cold and as I got into bed I could not help feeling guilty, thinking of the exposed eggs. I need have had no qualms, for early next morning I found the hen on the nest again and in the afternoon just before I left that place, I watched the cock take over, and settle firmly on posterity.

This was first published on 20 November 1955 in The Sunday Statesman
 

The Rishi Valley bird race

Feb 1st 2014: It is time for the annual bird race at Rishi Valley, and my husband and I are the adult visitors, along with a gaggle of excited little kids.  Our 12th standard son towers over them amusedly, too cool to be so animated about anything!

We birded for a few hours on Saturday, and returned to do a few more hours on Sunday morning, and enjoyed the walks and the crisp, cool air, the company and of course the birds.

The roosting night jar, the flycatcher in full plumage, a short-toed snake eagle circling above and the Verditer flycatcher were my highlights.  And oh yes the trio of owlets that looked down on us.

The enormous wood spider needed a better camera but the iphone did justice to the bougainvilla and the mango flowers.

Spot the Nightjar!

Spotting my first mango flowers of the season

As we searched for the Baya weavers I found these.

Do you see a huge wood spider in the middle, feasting on a grasshopper? 

A common leopard butterfly suns itself

We hope to be back next year, though the shortage of water looms over the campus.

Cixi and Beijing

Beijing: Boxer rebellion

12:00AM BST 24 Jun 2000

All boxed in: Allied troops after the rebellion

'THE WELL of the Pearl Concubine" read the official notice in English. We peered at the small opening sealed by stone slabs. We were in the Forbidden City, once home to the Emperors of China.

Not far away, on the other side of the thick, pink walls, Beijing's traffic was pounding by and the Chinese version of yuppies hurried along the top of Tiananmen Square to their next appointment, mobile telephones clamped to their ears.

But in this quiet courtyard it was not hard to conjure another world: one in which eunuchs in silk shoes served banquets of a thousand courses and Manchu girls in jewelled, tasselled headdresses groomed empresses whose hair was considered so precious that the strands were plucked from the jade combs and stored in porcelain pagodas.

I was in Beijing to research a book about a pivotal event plotted and controlled from within these precincts a century ago. In the summer of 1900, an obscure peasant sect - nicknamed "Boxers" because of the martial arts they practised - rose up. With the encouragement of the elderly Empress Dowager of China, Cixi, on June 20, 1900, they began a siege of the foreign community in Beijing's diplomatic quarter which lasted 55 days.

An international army, led by Britain's General Gaselee, finally marched to Beijing. As this foreign force battered at the southern gates of the Forbidden City, Cixi cut her nine-inch-long fingernails and disguised herself as a peasant woman. She summoned her nephew, the Emperor, to the courtyard in which we were standing and ordered him to prepare to flee with her.

The Emperor's favourite, the Pearl Concubine, begged to be allowed to accompany him but an irritated and anxious Cixi, who had long resented the girl's influence, ordered the palace eunuchs to throw her down the well. It looks too small to accommodate any but the tiniest body, but our guide swore that the story is true, an example of the immorality of the decadent Manchu Court.
The 9,000-room Forbidden City has witnessed many violent scenes. The Ming Emperors began its construction in the 15th century, but it was seized by the Manchus who swept across the Great Wall in 1644 to establish the Qing Dynasty. The last Ming Emperor hanged himself in shame and despair from a tree which still clings to life in an adjoining park where today families picnic.
The Qing embellished their new possession, building with magnificent symmetry and symbolism. Five white marble bridges in the form of writhing dragons span the courtyard leading to the Supreme Harmony Gate, once designated solely for the Emperor's use. Beyond lies a vast space where 100,000 subjects could prostrate themselves before him. A series of grand ceremonial palaces, with names such as the Hall of Supreme Harmony and the Palace of Heavenly Purity, runs northward.
The crowds of Chinese visitors who sweep daily into the Forbidden City cluster in these halls to photograph each other in Manchu robes hired from nearby stalls. Many peer excitedly through the windows, pointing out the dusty, jewel-encrusted imperial thrones within.
I found the imperial living quarters, hidden away down labyrinthine passageways, more intriguing and atmospheric. Away from the tourist crowds, you can stroll around airy, vermilion-pillared pavilions furnished with low, brocade-covered couches, carved wooden screens and jade and cloisonn* ornaments. The dragon motif, symbol of the Son of Heaven, the Emperor, is everywhere, even embossed on the yellow-glazed roof tiles - a reminder that, apart from the eunuchs, he was the only man allowed, on pain of death, to spend the night here.
These more intimate areas evoked strongly for me the enigmatic Cixi, a woman rumoured to have had a voracious sexual appetite and whose enemies met untimely ends. She effectively ruled China for 40 years, dominating successive emperors.
She particularly loved plays and Chinese opera. The authorities have restored her brilliantly decorated theatre, with its cunningly contrived trap doors and concealed entrances through which elaborately and garishly painted demons would burst onto the stage. It has been done so well that I could easily imagine that she had just been applauding a performance from her balcony.
In her nearby apartments stands the yellow silk screen behind which she sat to take decisions of state since, as a woman, it would have been improper to reveal herself to her councillors. Her phoenix couch is in an adjacent chamber where, the foreign community gossiped, she received lovers smuggled into the palace.
Her portrait of Queen Victoria has gone, however. Cixi was fascinated by Victoria, another woman ruling in a man's world. She was eager to learn more about her and was particularly intrigued by her relationship with her Scots gillie, John Brown, wanting to know whether he was "cut off from the family way" - that is, a eunuch.
Nevertheless, her interest in the British queen did not prevent Cixi from loathing foreigners and encouraging the Boxers to wipe them out. The quarter where the foreigners fought for their lives, surviving on a diet of pony meat and rice, lies a few hundred yards to the south-east of the Forbidden City.
In 1900, it was surrounded by makeshift barricades and the humid summer air was sweet with the stench of decaying corpses. Traumatised survivors recalled how, at the height of the attacks, they saw Cixi standing on the Forbidden City walls and observing their bombardment with interest.
I still caught a strong sense of what the old foreign quarter must have been like, although the Hotel de Pekin and the shops that once sold Monopole Champagne to epicurean Manchu princes and suave diplomats are long gone. The walkway beneath the dual carriageway running into Tiananmen Square leads to the heart of the quarter. Walk along the avenue once known as Legation Street (now Dong jiao min xiang) and over the grey walls you glimpse shaded grounds and spacious European-style houses now put to other uses.
The former British legation compound, which formed the kernel of the foreigners' defences, still stands on what was once Canal Street (now Tai ji chang), running due south from the Forbidden City. It now houses the Ministries of State and Public Security. The stone royal coat of arms above the old gatehouse, from behind which British marines picked off Chinese snipers, has gone and the gatehouse itself has been turned into a shop selling security equipment. When, in 1959, the Chinese insisted that the British quit the compound, the British took relics of the siege to their new premises.
In the Ambassador's garden at the new embassy in the east of the city, I saw memorials to those who died and the battered, shot-marked bell cast for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee which was used to sound the alarm at the most dangerous moments of the siege.
The brass eagle lectern presented to the British by grateful Americans after the relief now stands in the entrance to the Ambassador's house. It shows little sign of the damage it suffered when British diplomats used it to barricade a door against Red Guards who attacked the embassy during the the Cultural Revolution.
Many of Beijing's important landmarks have some association with the Boxer Rebellion. The Catholic Peitang Cathedral, where a force of French and Italian marines successfully defended 3,000 Chinese Christians against Boxers occupying the narrow lanes around it, lies just north of the Forbidden City, its fa?ade still pock-marked with shot and shell.
Today, taxi drivers offer tours around these timeless alleys where worm-eaten wooden doors lead into miniature courtyards filled with plants and raucous with caged songbirds. The smell of garlic mingles with frangipani and occasionally a whiff of sewage, a reminder that the foreigners of a century ago called the city Pekin-les-Odeurs.
South of the Forbidden City lies another building intimately, albeit ingloriously, connected with the Rebellion. The Temple of Heaven, completed under the Ming Emperors in 1420 and with an exquisite blue-tiled, domed hall, was regarded as the meeting place of heaven and earth. Every year the Emperor made sacrifices here to the gods. His annual pilgrimage to the temple was so sacred that the people of Beijing were forbidden to watch.
In 1900, monocled British officers feasted in the shrine where the Emperor had spent the night in fasting and prayer. They also staged amateur theatricals, causing a British magazine to rail: "This combination of vulgarity and indecency is one of the things which makes the English so much detested by other races."
Today, the temple precincts have recovered their dignity. People shadow-box and old men sit under the trees playing chess.
North-west of Beijing is Cixi's adored Summer Palace where she paused in her flight in 1900. This lakeside complex of pleasure gardens and pavilions has been rebuilt and restored many times; the current palace dates back to the 19th century.
The charming half-mile walkway, painted with Chinese birds, flowers and scenes from mythology, where Cixi and her ladies once strolled along the shores of Kunming Lake, is still there. So is the superb, two-tiered white marble boat which she built with money that was supposed to have been spent on the navy.
The Summer Palace was sacked by the Russians in 1900. Foreigners brought picnic hampers to the marble boat and rode their bicycles around the walkway, but the fabric has survived. Today, Chinese families go boating on the lake and fly kites in Cixi's pleasure gardens and the tourists mingle with them.
Cixi's attempt to get rid of the foreigners failed. Back in Beijing's new diplomatic quarter, I passed stalls hawking export surplus Calvin Klein underwear, copies of designer clothes and a few last Beanie Babies to enthusiastic foreigners. It reminded me how in 1900, before the Boxer storm, Chinese merchants happily sold silks, furs and pearls to eager foreign diplomats' wives. However many spasms have gripped this city since, some things remain the same. I wondered what Cixi would make of her capital today.

From:  Besieged in Peking' (Constable) by Diana Preston

The Tiantan park

June 9th 2013:  A cold and wet day in Beijing.  I was at the Zijin Cheng in the morning, and here we were, in the evening, with very little time, trying to understand another imperial structure, the Tiantan complex, some 2.7 sq kms of it, in an hour, even as closing time was upon us.

The Tiantan complex is supposedly larger than the Zijin Cheng, because the abode of the emperors could not possibly be larger than the abode of the gods could it?

The Ming and Qing emperors came here during the winter solstice to pray for a good harvest

The beautiful three-layered roof of the main Temple of Heaven was a modification.  Intially, it was built as a rectangular hall.

You approach it via these steps (in groups of nine), with marble balustrades.

The three eaves represent heaven, earth and the rest of the world, supposedly.  The work was beautiful. And seemed so perfect as well.

Hard to imagine that this complex was occupied by the British (yes, those very same colonials), during the shameful second Opium War, and joined by the French as well.  It supposedly served as their HQ through that war, and then in 1900, the Eight Nation Alliance also occupied this temple.

I found this picture from the National Archives of a German officer in front of the Eastern Gate of the complex.

But (atleast from what we saw in our hurried visit), none of this history or damage is evident in this complex, and the Tiantan Park is beautiful, and enjoyed by all sorts of Beijingers.

The Circular Wall is also called the Echo Wall

The archway through which you enter, and the vast and lovely woods all around

The bright decorations on the beams.  The whole place has no nails, we heard, and was rebuilt after a fire caused by lightning brought it down in 1889.

The main altar where the emperor prayed.  The interior roof was magnificent, but it was not possible to get a good picture.

The altar complex.  I wonder if there were sacrifices? 

The Circular Mound Altar, on which the emperor stood and prayed for good weather.  There are nine rings of stone, with the number of stones in each ring increasing as multiples of nine.  How cool is that? 

What were these?  i've forgotten now!

Someone with a sense of humour!

We could not gain entry into the other halls and temples, as the gates were gently shut in our faces.

But we walked the absolutely beautiful woods around, where I could have quite easily have spent an entire day.

There was a covered walkway where older Chinese played cards, carrom and even sang and danced!

Thanks to Yuan Shikai then for releasing this park into public domain.

There were magnificent cypress trees.  Supposedly there's one which is some 500 years old...I didnt bump into it.

One of the avenues....

Back into the bus, and looking back at the gate to the complex...out of one world and into modern Beijing once again.

We forged our way through rush hour, which, like everything in Beijing, is of monstrous and epic proportions.

I just loved the way  they have preserved these oases of peace, quiet and green in this urban jungle.

The city is endless and relentless, and I have never felt so much like a villager.

So is this what a city of the future  will be like?

It was good to escape the streets and go back into another wonderland of Chinese lanterns, fine dining and good company.

A couple of wine glasses later, I was cheery, light-headed and absorbed by the enigma of the old China that coexists with the new China, the two worlds quite separate it seemed, unlike India, where they bump into each other chaotically, constantly and overwhelmingly.