Friday, November 20, 2020

Beach walks

 

Creamy mallows, and blushing Ipomoeas.  Blue skies and a bright sun.

The waters glimmer and shimmer.  I look hopefully.  No dolphins sighted.

But hello, what is this?  The waves washed over it and it moved tentatively.  that one claw looked a bit disjointed.  Actually it looked "dirty".  See the pink and the brown cover.  Yuvan wondered if it was a Decorator Crab. Eh?

And so I learnt about decorator crabs which cover themselves with all sorts of things as part of camouflage - from seaweed to coral bits, to even moss and sea anemones.  Who would have thought!  

I also got a response from Vardhan patankar, via Manish Chandi that this is a spider crab, genus Doclea.  "Quite common across the Indian coastline, he said.  Seen it on the Goa coasts.

Bivalves were all over the intertidal area - Siliqua radiata - all empty shells.

This tower snail (Turritella),  seemed to be alive and on the move - see the trail behind it.

This Plough Snail was alive too.  The snail foot was moving.  Such beautiful texture and delicate colouring of its shell.

Ipomoea pes-caprae - a beautiful sight in the mornings.  

A Chalky Percher rested on the sands.

I almost missed this ghost crab - it was a brave one - stared at me and didn't vanish down its hole.

Pretty dishes, facing the sun.

With their two lobed thick leaves

Can't seem to get enough of them.

More, next time.

Friday, October 30, 2020

Loving the rains - new leaves and flowers

 

Our Tulsi plants are happy and blooming - Ocimum tenuiflorum

Rains last night,
Purple bells in my garden this morning
What magic is this?

The rain is magical - it makes every plant kind of perk up like nothing else.  And that is true of all my ten and a half balcony pots.   No wonder that the monsoon makes the artist in us wax lyrical.  

To my delight, the rains have brought the flowers and fresh leaves as well to my tulsi pots.  For some reason, these tulsi flowers transport me to the Valley of Flowers, the valley floor filled with green and wild flowers.  The last few days, the weather has also been like that - ok I'm imagining yes (I hope Sriram doesn't read this) - cloudy, with a cool breeze, and rain.

The rains have also brought a mouse to the house.  It feasted on the plentiful supply of bananas and melon seeds that i had carelessly left on my kitchen counter, and has decided not to leave,  Last two nights it has neatly eaten the coconut in the mouse trap and gone. Tom and Jerry games await, with me being Tom I think.




Friday, September 4, 2020

Lockdown Diaries - Ecosystems, learning and relationships

29th August 2020

A Saturday morning, and I'm up with the excited mynahs outside my window.  After a long gap, I headed to the OMR Tree Park of Nizhal, and with the excuse of assisting with some deweeding and basic gardening, I actually had a lovely outdoor morning.  (Mutualism?)

Rashmi left me to my own devices, and it was good to be on my own, working at my own pace, observing the ants.  A huge carpenter bee buzzed past, busy in the morning dipping into all the Calatropis flowers.


Milkweed (Calatropis procera) was in bloom everywhere


 

Calatropis, what an amazing plant.  This milkweed will never disappoint, always has so much going on.

Reminded me of Yuvan's insightful essay on The Ecosystem of Learning where he writes, "Within a square-inch of space I had seen awhole web of ecological relationships,..."

He writes about the experiments of the Songlines Farm School in moving children to the centre of education, changing their perspectives from an object-driven to a process driven understanding, which means the inclusions of all living beings in a relationship web.  The article is in full below.

Getting back to the Calatropis. and kin (read about ki and kin in the article), insects. 

A Gaudy grasshopper family (Poekilocerus pictus)  were busy feeding on the milkweed, which is considered poisonous to everything else.

Predation - A jumping spider had caught and was busy snuffing the life out of another insect that I couldn't make out.


This Lynx Spider, on the other hand, was not so lucky and was yet to find ki's breakfast 


Mutualism - A Small Banded Swift - a butterfly was also on the lookout for nectar

A better picture of the Skipper, but I have not yet identified this tree

Competition? Elsewhere on what looked like some member of the legume family, a Small Transverse Lady Beetle seemed to be having a face off with the black ant.  The beetle was probably looking to eat some aphids, which the ant was busy rearing?  

I admired the designs on this shiny red beetle (Coccinella transversalis)


The Calatropis plants were in fruit and seed.  Fruits created by the pollination of a whole set of different pollinators.  This one was ready to let go of more seeds.  And ki also was feeding many insects and beetles.

And after much workout for my knees and back - all that sitting on the haunches while deweeding - it was time to leave.  The butterflies and Odonates were just beginning to whizz around.  A whole host of Tawny Costers, Plain Tigers, Grass Yellows, and even a Blue striped tiger.  I saw my first Picture Wing dragonfly as I walked around outside the park, among the overgrown weeds and grass.

The wonderful work that the Nizhal team does, day in and day out, come rain come shine, through the lockdown and pandemic, sometimes even through the thoughtlessness of institutional action, it is remarkable and inspiring. 

Putting into action what Yuvan writes about.

Here is the essay.

The Ecosystem of Learning

By M. Yuvan on Aug. 27, 2020 in Environment and Ecology
Reimagining an Earth-centric and child-centric education

Specially written for Vikalp Sangam

On the Drumstick tree dozens of Lappet moth caterpillars had begun to descend from the foliage. Their furry bodies draped its trunk. Tender bark exfoliated with their feeding. I was accompanying a group of children to the animal shed, at the Songlines Farm School. Songlines is an alternative educational space I am part of running under Abacus Montessori School, where children and educators live and learn on a farm, with the natural environment. It is located in the small village of Vellaputhur, in the district of Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu. The monsoon was retreating, and the dense December mist would veil every dawn for several more days.

Larvae throw a unique challenge to language. Lappet caterpillars physiologically lack a gender till they metamorphose into moths. For the period of their larval lives they are non-binary creatures and their physicality ‘trans’cends our commonly held gender notions. Let us for a moment suppose – if we had to address the caterpillar, how would we, while also treating it as an alive, animate creation? What pronoun would we use to describe its activities on the Drumstick tree? She, he, it – all fall short. ‘They’, ‘them’, ‘Ze’, Zir’ are now coming into use. The bryologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer has proposed the words ‘ki’ and ‘kin’, singular and plural respectively, as gender-neutral more-than-human pronouns, for trees, moss, mountains and others we’d like to speak of, ascribing animacy to. ‘Ki’ is from Potawatomi, a native American language. ‘Kin’ is from English, ringing with kinship. They happen to be phonetically related words.

“Ki is crawling down the trunk to pupate in the soil”

“Kin are more in number on the shady side of the tree”

I feel a dormant part of my mind shifting in its sleep when I speak these sentences. They stretch my mind in an unfamiliar direction, though a strangely intimate one.Here is a new portal of greeting, speaking, meaning-making when I meet caterpillars, trees and millipedes.

Across the line of Drumstick trees, in the vegetable garden, I would later do an exercise with children, as another experiment in shifting perception.

Some weeks later. Children strolled among the vegetable plants with iron pans to harvest Lady’s finger, Brinjal and Azuki beans. I crouched by some bean plants which were swathed with Aphids, to photograph some event which may occur amongst their gatherings. Golden backed Ants (Camponotus sericeus) farmed them with their antennae-tapping. Ants have been livestock-keepers for many millions of years before humans. Aphids in turn secrete sugar solution for the security services provided by the ants. Leaf petioles held fresh frothy spawn of froghoppers. I turned over bean leaves one by one, looking for any interesting insect-world occurrence, and the underside of one leaf offered me a radically new idea to engage children.

In the spaces between the veins were Aphid patches. Two Zig-zag Ladybird Beetles, staunchly aphidophagous creatures, were lazily eating them from one end. In a while an Ant came to check on its bug-herd, and charged open-mandibled at the raiding beetles, both of whom flew away as soon as the leaf shook with the ant’s arrival. Within a square-inch of space I had seen a whole web of ecological relationships, between four beings.

Let me list them –

Aphid on the Bean plant – Parasitism

Ladybird Beetle and Bean plant – Mutualism

Beetles eating Aphids – Predation

Ant and Beetles – Competition

Aphids and Ant –Mutualism

Bean plant and Ant – Commensalism



An entire ecological web under a bean leaf

In a few days, I sent groups of 9th grade children around the farm, each assigned a specific crop or plant – Paddy, Brinjal, Cluster Beans, etc. They were to observe the life on them, make observations, use field guides to identify the species they saw and make a ‘Relationship Web’. In mapping a relationship-web, children spread the names of the organisms they see, on paper. They then map six different ecological relationships (mutualism, parasitism, competition, predation, commensalism, and herbivory), each drawn with a different colour. Each creature is linked to every other one, through at least one of the colours – with a legend below as to which colour indicates what relationship. This is in contrast to a food-web, which is taught as an important concept in biology – a construct which portrays ecosystems as hierarchical, linear, and somewhat crudely communicating to children that organisms merely eat each other in nature - a structure somewhat reflective of our own linear extractive models of economy, society.

A Relationship-web maps an ecosystem more vividly and accurately. It is non-linear, complex, non-hierarchical and lends to many ways of seeing and comprehension. Children come up with composite and colourful maps of the microhabitat they have studied. You could start anywhere on it and follow it around in various ways, each an equally valid story of interactions and energy flow.



A relationship web mapped by children on the Bhindi/Lady’s Finger plant

Once the activity is over and the Relationship-webs are presented by each group, several reflections are pursued.

What were some new learnings and un-learnings during the activity? Which relationships are the most frequently noted in my web and why? How do soil, water, and air flow in it, animate it? How do we participate in this web?

With teachers and older students, I have pursued or been posed with some deeper questions which have sparked off other tangents of conversation –

“If democracy is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species”

– Robin Wall Kimmerer.

A relationship web charts what could be called an ‘inter-species democracy’ which is alive in natural ecosystems. Where extractive energy flows are balanced with counter flows to it. And where one can see interdependence, diversity, and plurality at work.

“When you see this paper, do you see the clouds?” – Thich Nhat Hahn

When we see life forms, do we see them as separate objects or do we also see their relatedness? How easily do we perceive relatedness?

What social constructs are reflected in other concepts and subjects taught in school? Do we want to reimagine, restructure them?

______________________________________________________________________

In her essay “Perceiving how we perceive”, educator Seetha Ananthasivan speaks about two different kinds of perception – object perception and process perception. She says, “a major preoccupation in nursery and primary education is on learning the names of objects.”Little is done to allow the child to discover the connected and hidden realities of these isolated objects. For instance, is a child encouraged to think, ask a question of a water bottle – where it came from, how it was made, where it will go after its use? This is process perception. In the materials we use, food we eat, clothes we wear, do we perceive beyond their separate forms?

We could say that the culture of consumerism, even the politics of capitalism thrives on object perception. Violence, deeply hidden and structural, is distanced from the products on their sanitized shelves. They dote on anaesthetized eyes which don’t and won’t see beyond them.

As somebody working at the intersection of education and conservation, I am interested in understanding if and how ecological loss affects the richness, depth, and diversity of our perception – especially of children who have come into the world during this period. Also, are we to pass on the same model of education we went through, in the era in which they’ve entered this planet?

In my experience as a teacher, young children have a natural familiarity and curiosity for parks, fields, beaches, bird sanctuaries - wildernesses. In little time they feel at home - somehow part of the living-systems themselves. This capacity of kinship and openness to the trees, birds, insects, and soil diminishes if such experiences are not created when they are young. Children are deprived from many ways of seeing, thinking, and learning when schooling is divorced from the natural world. Visionary educators like Maria Montessori and J.Krishnamurti have emphasised this in their teachings. In her concept of ‘Erd-Kinder’ Montessori stresses upon the importance of adolescent children growing in a farm-school, working with the land, growing their own food and being in touch with the landscape. She explains how this is a necessity for the developmental needs of children at this age. Richard Louv braids the wild and the wellbeing of the child intimately in his seminal book ‘Last Child in the Woods’. He emphatically says that “if we are to save the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species – the child in nature”. Children and nature have a reciprocal relationship in protecting each other.

Work by psychologist Gail F. Melson opens up how contact with other forms of life is important in all aspects of child development – cognitive, social, emotional, and moral. She, like others, attributes this to the fact that nature is the most complex and composite learning environment we can provide a child, and hence an un-substitutable one.

I am continually astonished by how a well-planned activity in Kotturpuram Tree Park or Adyar Poonga or Vedanthangal Bird Sanctuary, or at our arboretum at Songlines is inclusive and supportive of a variety of learning styles. Time and again, children labelled as ‘challenged’ by the linear yardsticks within the cinderblocks of classrooms, are able to express and enjoy themselves through their unique capacities and on their own terms, in living learning environments.

I am also keen on exploring how we can bring ecological principles into our schools and learning environments, just as we bring learning environments into ecological spaces. A fundamental aspect to any ecosystem is ‘diversity’. As Colin Baker has put it “In the language of ecology, the strongest ecosystems are those that are the most diverse.” In a single ecosystem we notice that there exists rich perceptual diversity. The Ghost Crab which sees the horizon as a full circle with its periscope-like cylindrical eyes. The strange Chiton, an unearthly mollusc, which sees in magnetic field lines and has an astonishing acumen for navigating the seabed. The Sea-Eagle which rides rising thermals and sees in heat. The mangrove trees which live by the tidal rhythm, stand on stilts, and speak with each other through fungal networks under the ground. The Blue button, which looks like a little jellyfish but is a colony of creatures working together like an organism, a puzzle between singular and plural. The Magpie Robin which makes new music each morning, who never sings the same song twice. The Octopus which speaks through colour. The Sea snake which paints its world through smell. Each creature has its own distinct perceptual field. Each sees the world so differently. Yet this diverse mosaic of perceptual fields, roles, and abilities, woven together by sand, air, sea and sky - form a webwork of numerous interdependent lives and a thriving and resilient intertidal habitat.

Can children’s learning environments be an ecosystem? A place inclusive of diversity – inclusive of all kinds of intelligences, capacities, cognitions – which makes it a rich habitat rooted in the place it is in. Such an ecology of learning spaces would be both Earth-centric and child-centric, and these, I think, are urgently needed now for children and the planet.

The mainstream education system is both unnatural and detrimental for this Earth-child complex we have been discussing. It is often described as ‘factory-schooling’ as it is rooted in mono-culturing and homogenizing children’s minds and aspirations. It is also a fundamental driving force for the economic system and the destructive model of ‘development’, both of which are the primary propellers of climate crisis, biodiversity loss and the social injustice we are witnessing today. As Carol Black says, the conventional education system functions such that children are “molded and fashioned like any other industrial raw material into a predetermined finished product”. It was devised for a dream of colonial industrial utopia. And I agree with David Brooks who describes that “its main activity is downloading content into students’ minds, with success or failure measured by standardized tests”. Those whose capabilities lie in the vast ‘outside’ of the system’s purview are ‘failed’, creating what Manish Jain calls a “new kind of academic caste hierarchy” and a “crime against humanity”. We treat children like inert media, passive recipients to be shaped into products for society – consumer beings. Often, their growth and blossoming, if at all, is in spite of schooling. Notably and not surprisingly, such education treats ecological literacy as adjunct, optional or unnecessary portions to be omitted.

The current schooling system also devalues diverse kinds of cognition. I immediately think of children I have interacted with along the Elliot’s beach over the years, who belong to the local fishing communities. They have a profound knowledge of the coast and seas. They are innately aware of the longshore currents, tides and can plainly predict weather. I can do none of these, despite walking these shores for over two decades. Or consider the children of the Kattunayakan tribes of the Nilgiris who can understand and track bees and hold vast spatial maps of the forest in their minds. Though modern schooling marginalizes these communities and seeks to make them ‘literate’, their embodied ecological literacy is astounding and is something no mainstream school has achieved. For the indigenous and Adivasi communities of India, education, and the ideals it imposes, has often been a form of acculturation, by de-basing their knowledge-systems. Younger generations are no longer valuing them and are no longer bearers of their eco-cultural wisdom.

A counter current to this form and definition of education has been emerging -through schools, colleges, and other institutions and movements whose core principles draw from ecological values, democratic values, and inclusivity of children – across learning styles, cognitions, and contexts. The unschooling and home-schooling movements have had an important role to play in this too. For my own work as a nature-educator, my visits to and interactions with such alternate schools have been deeply formative. They include Pathashaala, Bhoomi College, Marudham school, Shikshantar, SECMOL, Barefoot College, Swaraj University, Wild Shaale among others. And for the curriculum and activities I plan for children at Songlines, I have made for myself a ‘Songlines Wheel’ based on these learnings. This is the value wheel which I draw upon, to keep me grounded.

The Songlines wheel has at its centre Child, Earth, and Community. And its spokes hold various values under each, which guide the teacher. The wheel is the basis of an ‘Un-syllabus’ we are evolving - a participative, spacious, and context-based curriculum based on these values.

Here are some of its broad guidelines –

Bottom-up pedagogy – this means that the context, place, children, and their energies and capacities decide the curriculum. The curriculum is place-based. As opposed to the mainstream curriculum, which is top-down and sets a single rigid syllabus for everybody regardless of these diversities of contexts.

Conscious of content and process – this means that ‘what’ is being learnt or facilitated and ‘how’ it is done are given equal thought, time and effort. Conventional syllabi ignore processes and impose purely content.

Active learning –This is where children are active part-takers in the planning and learning process and have space to direct it and shape it.

Plurality – This has multiple implications. One is that these learning spaces normalize all kinds of learners and are inclusive of learner-diversity. Second is that lessons involve the head, hand, and heart and blur the artificial distinctions between sciences, arts, languages, and humanities, leaving no child feeling excluded. Third is that learning spaces are multidirectional – wherein learning happens along various trajectories, not just in the uni-direction of teacher-to-student. It also means that it’s a horizontal and poly-vocal space – where all voices speak and are listened to.

Values of Social and environmental justice– This means that rights of people and nature are respected and need protection for a just, egalitarian, and healthy community. Citizenship education is an important part of this where children learn their laws, rights and means to actively participate and partake in society.

With the Covid lockdown, we had to take our farm-school to the virtual medium and it was at first a challenge to envision such a programme through a digital screen. Just then the Tamil Nadu state government announced the denotification of a significant part of Vedanthangal Bird Sanctuary – a place all the classes have visited, to watch birds and understand this lake’s rare example of community conservation. Our first module was to research about this issue and make campaign-art for Vedanthangal. The children’s work depicting their bond with the bird sanctuary and asking it to be saved, inspired many more schools after print media covered it. It incited numerous more voices to stand up for the cause. (Read Children Make Art to Save Vedanthangal Bird Sanctuary)

Following this module, some classes studied and illustrated the life-arc of various waste or unused materials at home and did upcycling projects with them. These came out to be cycle-tire clocks to a school bag stitched from outgrown jeans to toy-sets from cardboard to coconut-shell hand sanitizers. Other classes conducted ‘water audits’ in their homes, and researched and presented on various traditional water conservation systems in India. The lockdown had given us a strange opportunity to find other paths of learning and engagement, which, ‘unconfined’, we would not have thought of.

Through a subsequent module, the children became ‘Young Journalists’. Small groups reached out to various experts, naturalists, environmentalists, local people, government officers, etc. and conducted interviews about current environmental issues, and shared their findings with the larger group. And presently the older students are making a place-based, illustrated alphabet book for the primary school children (ages 2 to 6). A for Adyar river, B for Banyan, C for Coucal, D for Damselfly and so on. Words these young children can find, see, touch, enter and directly sensorially connect with in their school campus, around their homes and in the local landscape.


Monday, August 24, 2020

Assam Day 5 - Seeking the dolphins, encountering the Osprey - the gigantic Brahmaputra

 Continued from here.

15th Jan 2020

On to Kaziranga, from Mangaldoi, today.  But first, we were to stop at the Brahmaputra and take in a river cruise as we searched for the Gangetic dolphins.

We were headed west, staying north of the Bramhaputra, a 3 hour journey.

We stayed on NH15 for the most part, the highway was in good shape.  As we reached Tezpur, there was more military presence and large, walled military compounds.  I learnt that Tezpur is one of the old cities of Assam, and there is a lot to see here, but we were not stopping.  The British made it into an army Headquarters for the region.  

Aparna wrote this in our trip report:

The place Tezpur was named for the rivulets of blood that flowed there. Legend has it that this was the place where the war between Banasura, who was King of the area, and Krishna took place. Banasura’s daughter, Usha, dreamt of Anirudh, the grandson of Krishna. Her friend Chitralekha drew his portrait and through her magical powers brought him to Usha. Banasura refused to give his consent for the marriage. That is when Krishna went to war. The war was actually fought between Shiva and Krishna as Banasura was a devotee of Shiva. And much blood was shed.  It is said that Brahma had to intervene to stop the fight. However Shiva gave in to the reason of Krishna and relented.  

We drove on to the river bank, close to the Kalia Bhamora bridge that spans the river over here.  

We walked across the fine river sand to the boats with colourful canopies.  It was close to 11am and the sun was blazing through, but the river was a vast expanse of a still dull, muddy colour.  To me, at that moment it felt like this large, silent, somewhat sullen, sleeping beast.  The currents were strong but one wouldn't guess it, due to the vastness of the river.

As we chose our boats, there was a sudden commotion, with everyone telling Shuba not to move.  She was startled but complied to the urgent orders.  On her ghamsa-covered head was what looked like a little colourful brooch! 

The butterfly brooch - Delias descombesi, the redspot Jezebel

Chinese fishing nets.  I read somewhere that the river supports some 222 species of fish! Tezpur is one of the important fishing centres on the river.  But the fish population is greatly depleted, due to human activity (of course, what else).

I think Pranjal mentioned Grey throated Sand Martins flitting along the river banks - but I did not see them (as usual).  

On returning, I did some reading on the sedimentation and turbidity of the river.  A 2017 NDTV article mentioned that the turbidity measure at Tezpur was 195 NTU (Nephelometric Turbidity Unit), as against a permissive level of NTU5!  Aparna, who collects river waters, dipped a bottle in, and I was quite surprised - the water was clear, not turgid as I expected. The heavy sedimentation adversely affects fish life as also the Gangetic Dolphin, that we were out looking for.

That's us - adding colour to the river.  Picture by R Shantharam

The Brahmaputra river system is one of those huge carriers of sediment, and this sediment forms sand banks and islands - chapori - which can support a lot of bird life.  


You could also get small grassy islands in the middle - so vast is the river.

The Gangetic Dolphin (Platanista gangetica)

Several of our group had already gone on this boat ride on their last trip to Arunachal and they asked us to keep our eyes peeled.  We were warned that it would not be like some NatGeo movie where it would gently, gracefully and in slow motion arc out of the water and show itself to you. It will be in and out in the blink of an eye. A grey shadow in the water. And that's exactly what it was. 

We had a lot of these fleeting 'darshans' of the greyish brown snouts of these endemic, poor eyesight river Dolphins, which are highly ecologically stressed. They are on the IUCN red list

We were in two boats with a canopy that shaded us from the sun.  The boat engines created a hell of a racket, and he would cut the engines every now and then, and we would drift. Those were the best moments. The river was a dull grey brown and placid.  The whole scene was tinged in grey and brown.

They spend an average 107.3 seconds under water and 1.26 seconds above water. Once, the most commonly sighted aquatic mega-fauna in the Brahmaputra river system, it now faces extirpation from most of the major tributaries of the Brahmaputra and restricted to a few pockets in the mainstream.

Unregulated rise in human activities is causing serious degradation in dolphin habitats in the Brahmaputra. Acoustic vision being the primary mode of perceiving the environment for these animals, increasing noise levels and industrial activities cause major disruption in their perception of biologically critical sounds.

Scientists find conservation efforts of river dolphins in the Brahmaputra have largely ignored the aspect of Acoustic Habitat Degradation.

I didnt realise - dams on the river have isolated dolphin populations.  There are supposedly more than 50(!!) dams of different sizes on the Brahmaputra, fragmenting these populations, making them in-breed, disturbing the availability of their food.  So, not only on land are forests being isolated, but even in the water.  

The Osprey encounter


What I managed to photograph...

Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) - have seen them before, but this was a thrilling experience to see this one so close, and then take off and glide lazily through the sky.  Pranjal had said that we would most probably see one of these fish eating raptors over the waters, and yes his prediction was right.  
.

Photo by Elumalai - as it sat, an emperor of all it surveyed, or a masked bandit?  The Osprey is supposed to be the only raptor with all toes being equal in size.  interesting, did not know this.  Does that make a difference in how it perches?

Photo by Elumalai - All set to take off, possibly disturbed by our outboard motor.  Rounded talons and a reversible outer toe means that it can catch those slippery fish with two toes in front and two behind.  

Photo by Venkatesh, as it took to the air, showing us the "fingers" on its wing feathers, and its spread out short tail.

Photo by Venkatesh - the white breast and the golden brown upper wings - what a magnificent sight it was!
Photo by Venkatesh - we gawked at the wingspan - a good 4-5 feet, as it flapped them in slow succession  and moved away from us.



This photo by Suresh - of the brown upper parts and those four long finger-like feathers, with the fifth being a bit shorter.  The drooping hands are a characteristic flight posture of this piscetarean.


We chugged along back now under the bridge and what seems like the new Brahmaputra bridge coming up alongside.

Mountains of concrete, as Man looks to overcome natural "obstacles"?
Add caption

Do we need another?

Off the boat, and we found little "loo huts".  

A group picture and some tea and potato biscuits, before we set off for lunch and then Kaziranga.

Very tasty!  A new discovery.  Potato "biscuits".  They were so yummy, I brought a couple of packets back home.
Tree sparrows
A reminder of what was going on in the country.

We were coming across to the southern bank of the mighty river, and turning east, to Kaziranga. 


Saturday, August 15, 2020

Assam Day 4 - Orang!

May 2020

Trains are getting lost, flights are getting cancelled, locusts are swarming the plains of north India.  As expected, cases are doubling in states like Assam.

August 2020

Floods in Assam, and the sanctuaries and animals are in distress, with no access to highlands for them.  

COVID continues its merry spread across cities and states, though it does seem to have slowed in Chennai.  And I sill have not finished this post.

Here is another stab at it. 

15th August 2020 - 7 months to the day, oh my goodness this definitely is getting finished today!  What better way to mark our independence, than write about a visit to a remote corner of India early this year.  

14th January 2020

Continued from here.

Goodbye Manas
Today was the day we were moving to Orang, where we would have one afternoon safari, and spend the night at the town of Mangaldoi, which we would pass actually on our way to Orang.

All woollens packed into my large bag - I was relieved to have brought an outsized bag, as I could just throw stuff in any which way, and now it had an added item - the bamboo "vase" which is about 18 inches long!

We bundled into our cars, said a big thank you to the Florican staff  at Manas (I wondered if I would ever return there again), as set off for Orang/Mangaldoi.




A 10 am halt at Nalbari for tea, and we were exposed to the Bihu market wonders - all sorts of things.
 
 




A man held a fish as if it was the most normal thing to do - maybe it was for him.  Not for me.  I gawped, just like the poor fish.




The bamboo baskets all looked so inviting - but I followed a "Only look no buy" policy, and left without anything additional!  This was a fishing set.  




When I returned back to Chennai, Kamini was scandalised that I had passed by on nolan gur - which was being sold by the tubfulls.  Venkatesh (or was it Aparna?)  bought some delicious pedas - it was good to be travelling with them - we were constantly eating!

We crossed Mangaldoi, and continued.  Mustard fields were in bloom.

At around lunch time - oneish - (yes, time is measured by mealtimes), we arrived at Orang! We were at the gate of the park,  a newish resort - Green Planet just at the gate, but it was not large enough to accommodate us all overnight, so sadly we were trekking back into Mangaldoi for the night.  But for now, a clean loo was most welcome.

Trying hard to make the boys who were helping us at lunch to understand that no we didn't need plastic bottles of water, but a jug would do nicely thank you.  They looked at me as if I had gone mad....I suppose there was a lot lost in translation!

Orang - the first I heard of the place was in 2008, from Chithra,  as this back of nowhere place - and now I was there/here, never mind!

We met Najib, another young naturalist, and now, along with Pranjal and Yuvan, we had a trio of young naturalists!  Najib worked with Wild Wings, a local NGO in the area of wildlife conservation, and he was going to accompany us on our drive through Orang.


After lunch, we saw some jeeps, and all of us hopped into them, and waited.  and waited.  I was with Suresh and Pritam and Shuba.  After a bit of time, we heard a lot of Assamese exchanged between Pranjal and Najib and the drivers.  It seems that there was a standoff between the drivers and the forest rangers over manhandling of a tourist, and the park was actually closed that day!  

After much cajoling and explaining by Hiranya  that we had come all the way from Chennai, some kind of compromise was reached and we had to shift to some other jeeps (I guess these were the ones of the forest department and not the ones of the resort), and then we were let in.   


I was with cousin Kumar and Usha in the rearranging, and it was all in the family in our jeep.

Orang is a little park - 78 sqkm - on the north banks of the Bramhaputra, and if I'm not mistaken I recall Najib mentioning that it belonged to a Raja of the region.  The vegetation was very much like Manas - grasslands, and silk cotton.  

Bird community of Rajiv Gandhi Orang National Park, Assam
The entire protected area was a human habitation till the last decade of 19th century (Talukdar and Sharma 1995). The area was inhabited by different ethnic groups. The villages were abandoned during the latter part of the 19th century, and in course of time, the area became covered by vegetation where animals took shelter. In 1915, it was declared a Game Reserve. The area was declared Wildlife Sanctuary in 1985 and upgraded to a National Park in 8th April, 1999. Entire area of the RGONP is the core part of recently declared Orang Tiger Reserve in December, 2016.
Sitting quietly in the shade was an Asian barred Owlet, looking on seriously at us.  Soon it turned its back on us, but Suresh captured it sneaking a peek at us!


The undergrowth was beautiful as was the canopy above...where to look?

A fairy bluebird sat high on an exposed branch

We stopped at a watchtower and took in the landscape 


The Eurasian Wryneck

Then there was some scurrying in the undergrowth just below the watchtower, and Najib said it was a Eurasian Wryneck.  Now me and my myopia took ages to spot it, but  it kept everyone busy for a while as it scuttled among foliage, now you see it now you don't, the shutterbugs getting more and more frantic! 

Finally, even I saw it!  And even got some hopeless pictures of it.  

The Eurasian Wryneck - Jynx torquilla - a lifer for me.  It is a woodpecker, but what is it doing on the ground.  Strange bird!


It had these jerky movements and was always on the move.  I learned that it is a ground feeder and has a long tongue that it uses to probe for ants.  


I saw the characteristic "namam" down its back, but it was really well camouflaged, and busy!


There are videos on YT of this bird doing some interesting things with its rather supple neck.

A beautiful capture by Sudar of said Wryneck


And then we arrived at the forest bungalow from Chithra's account!  If only we could have stayed here.  What an idyllic location!  But everything looked totally rundown.  But why oh why does it have to be like this? Why do we find forest bungalows go into disrepair, and then new ones get built?


I could imagine staying at this guest house and looking out on the vast grasslands below

If you click on the picture and enlarge the panorama, you see, the view from the rundown guest house - the vast grasslands, in height order it seemed - the pasture and then medium height grass and then really tall elephant grass.
The tall grass, with the trees beyond

We just sat on the wood stumps, soaking it all in, as the sun slowly dipped and the light faded.  As the sun lowered, the birds were returning to their roosts.

It was a herbivore bonanza. Swamp deer, hog deer, boar, francolins, rhinos....all grazing peacably. No carnivore in sight. Egrets and kingfishers, drongos and bee eaters.


About 10% of the area of the ONP is wetlands and water - the Bramhaputra river, with its tributaries Pachnoi and Dhanisiri, flow through these areas, and there are also many "bheels" or lakes.

The Indian hog deer (Hyelaphus porcinus)

Another first for me was seeing these small deer, which are supposedly found across northern Indian plains.  Their body shape seemed a bit different, with downward  slopy shoulders.  The white on their tail was more evident when they flicked their tails, which was very often.


Assam seems to be their last refuge these days, as their numbers in areas like Corbett have dwindled.  I learnt that these are grassland deer, and were once much more abundant than chital, but as more and more grassland came under fire/degradation, these deer had nowhere to go.  


Now under the IUCN endangered list, I hoped that they continue to thrive here in Orang.

As with all of the creatures of the Bramhaputra region, the annual floods mean they have to move to highlands, but with more roads and development cutting off access to highlands, there is huge loss of hog deer every monsoon.  


They needs grasslands to fawn, so their successful  breeding is under threat with dwindling grasslands.


It was only 430 in the evening, but the sky ws darkening, and it was soon time to leave the park, but we had one last encounter, almost missed.  A lone elephant to the left of the road watched us go by.  The jeep driver was a little skittish and didn't want to linger - discretion around lone male elephants was what he muttered.

Beautiful sunset views as we bounced along the jungle roads to exit the parks, accompanied by the screeching of parakeets on their way back "home", wherever that was.


We exited the park and stopped for tea, and a tete a tee with Najib and his work. The tea was not worth writing about, but there was much banter as we waited in the chilly darkening evening air.

It was a couple of hours ride to Siddharth Palace, which was named more in hope and wish than in fact, but rather interesting.  Steep steps and up and up.  Rooms with glamorous velvet curtains behind which were plain brick walls, hmm.  And the steps (I kid you not). were not flat but seemed like out of that nursery rhyme - there was a crooked house. All those days at Manas we were served hot simple meals and it was fine.  Somehow this veneer of poshness and floating oil always makes me suspicious. So I ate sparingly (yes I can do that, believe me). The waiters were obsequious and supposedly the owner had a Madras connection - he had come to Chennai to do his engineering!!  It was Bihu night, and we were in for all night singing and dancing we were warned, and yes they partied all night long to a mixture of Bollywood and Assamese music.

We did not see the pygmy hogs - another species under threat because of lost grasslands.  ONP is a site of some pygmy hog restoration programme.  

 

 Day 5 - on to the river!

We of course were up with the lark, but the staff were all hungover and asleep and Pritam came down to find that we were locked in hahahaha. Some Hotel California like situation.  After some hollering, we were let out by some sleepy waiters. I went for a stroll and found some interesting things.


An Apollo Chennai outreach!
A doggie with offal

And this rather stern notice for employees of the hotel
which I noticed while having breakfast

I had packed up and come for breakfast leaving Devika in the room to finish and join us downstairs. Cars were getting loaded. She wandered down and told me  that she thought I had left my soap behind. So I went on up again on those crooked stairs to our room with the satin curtains, and retrieved my soap, and there I saw rubber chappals, green, near the bathroom door.  I muttered to myself that Devika has forgotten her slippers, picked them up with a flourish and went off downstairs after a final look around to ensure nothing else was abandoned. 

I marched purposefully to Devika calling out to her and waving the slippers, as she was loading her bag and I very helpfully wanted her to put it in before the bag got put away in the car boot. The waiter from the hotel was following me in a strange fashion.  At this point Devika told me, in her usual unhurried and calm voice, it's not mine Ambika, and .....I looked from slipper to her to the following waiter to all the other MNS members standing around looking on. The waiter sheepishly said, woh hamara hotel ka chappals hain (actually I should've been the sheepish one you would think). There was much tittering and guffawing as I hastily handed it back to him and ran off to wash my hands.  "What else are you smuggling away Ambika?" was the refrain, and Suresh was sure I had watched the movie If it's Tuesday it must be Belgium!  

And then we were off, to our next experience on the river itself.





Andaman Day 4 and 5 - Rangat scrub and open forests

Continued from here.  Click here for the previous post.  Feb 13th 2024 - Our Post lunch wander The post-lunch session is always one that req...