Wayanad visit - 2019

Observations uploaded on � iNaturalist

October 2019

A pre-covid visit with the family - a thoroughly enjoyable one, good food, quiet, lots of birds, butterflies and flowers, long walks, lazing and laughter.

Once we reached until we left, we only walked - did not use the car at all.

We had a balcony to sit and stare with a mulberry tree outside that attracted the birds and monkeys as well.

Ethical Birdwatching: The Harmful Effects of Playing Recorded Bird Calls

Indeed.

Ethical Birdwatching: The Harmful Effects of Playing Recorded Bird Calls

It is not a natural call: Stop playing it

Using recorded bird calls for sightings or photography is unethical and harmful, as it disrupts birds’ natural behaviors and causes stress

Gargi Mishra

But playing recorded bird calls or songs on gadgets to lure birds for sighting or photography is both unethical and harmful. To understand what the consequences for this practice might be, let’s first understand bird vocalisation.

Birds use two types of vocalisations: Calls and songs. Calls are generally short and simple, while songs tend to be longer and louder.

Birds call to maintain contact with companions using “contact calls.” Nestlings use “begging calls” to request food. Night-time migrants maintain contact with “flight calls.” “Food calls” attract offspring or flockmates to new food sources. Birds use “alarm calls” to warn others of danger and “mobbing calls” to summon others to harass a predator. “Aggressive calls” help settle conflicts between birds.

Exhaustive, right?

Birds sing “songs,” on the other hand, loudly and persistently to attract mates or repel territorial intruders.

So, when we play a bird call without understanding its type or purpose, simply to attract a specific species, we risk making serious errors. The consequences may be dire. Imagine the stress, confusion, and harm caused by repeatedly playing random bird calls through gadgets!

Consider this: you play a recorded call to attract birds feeding out of sight. Unknown to you, the recording is an alarm call. On hearing it, the flock panics and scatters. They return later, but you play the call again. This continues all day. In doing so, you deprive them of vital feeding time.

How?

Birds are “homeotherms,” like us, organisms that maintain a stable internal body temperature regardless of external conditions. But they have high metabolic rates and must eat frequently. Small birds have especially high energy needs. Interrupting their feeding may push them towards starvation and death.

Playback stops birds from doing what they should — feeding their young, avoiding predators, or defending territory. Such calls can act as distress signals, causing parents to leave the nest to investigate. Prolonged absence or missed feeds can endanger their offspring. Additionally, exposed parent birds become vulnerable to predators. Playback songs can be interpreted as territorial threats and may provoke aggression. This alters birds’ behaviour — parenting, defending, and foraging — depending on perceived threats.

Studies show that recorded songs played during breeding season provoke birds to sing intensively for days. Singing consumes a great deal of energy. If this energy isn’t replenished in time, the bird may die.

Other studies have found birds abandoning their territory when they hear recorded rival vocalisations. André MX Lima and James Joseph Roper documented this in their study, The use of playbacks can influence encounters with birds: An experiment.

Such disruptions are numerous. Foraging, parenting, and territorial defence are just a few daily bird behaviours. By playing recorded calls, we disturb and manipulate these, often causing stress and long-term behavioural damage.

Renowned ornithologist and independent researcher Gurpartap Singh, based in Mohali, Punjab, said, “Playing recorded bird calls to lure birds is generally not desirable, as it can be unethical and potentially harmful, causing stress and disrupting natural behaviours. It can lead to energy loss and negatively affect breeding and social structures, especially if overused. It may be permissible for scientific research, but only with caution and due consideration of the potential harm.”

Playback is illegal under Section 9 of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 as well. However, poor enforcement renders it ineffective. This practice is rampant across birding hotspots in India for sighting and photography. Worse still, hunters and bird-catchers use playback to lure birds for illegal trade, contributing to population decline.

Many conservationists are fighting this. Notably, Sanjay Sondhi — a Dehradun-based naturalist and founder of bioinformatics platform Titli Trust — has partnered with the Uttarakhand Forest Department to run awareness campaigns and sensitise naturalists and guides on the harms of bird call playback. In recognition of their support, the forest department issued appreciation badges to bird guides in Jim Corbett National Park.

After complaints of unethical bird call playback in Deulgaon village (Supe Forest area), a breeding site for Mottled Wood Owls near Pune, the forest department banned photography at the site.

What people should learn from rivers

(Highlighting is mine)

What people should learn from rivers

What people should learn from rivers

Robert Macfarlane and James Scott seek to understand the ways of water

May 1st 2025

Is a River Alive? By Robert Macfarlane. W.W. Norton; 384 pages; $31.99. Hamish Hamilton; £25

In Praise of Floods. By James Scott. Yale University Press; 248 pages; $28 and £20

There is an adage among journalists, known as Betteridge’s law, which holds that “Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘No’.” It is gloriously broken by Robert Macfarlane’s new book, “Is a River Alive?” Yes, the book answers. Yes it is: here are stories and observations and apprehensions that show how the lives of rivers and people interact with each other. Yes, for here that life is evoked in prose so forceful, thoughtful and beautiful that it can only be speaking the truth.

Dr Macfarlane, a professor of literature and the environmental humanities at Cambridge University, has a pragmatic agenda embedded in his powerful prose. To recognise rivers as living beings, as indigenous cultures so often have, is a useful step towards providing them with personhood and rights. Those rights can be used in campaigns that protect both rivers and the life they contain and sustain, be it of humans, other fauna, flora or fungi.

Not many rivers currently enjoy such respect; most are treated in purely utilitarian ways. In “In Praise of Floods”, a posthumous book by James Scott, an anthropologist and social theorist who died in 2024, Scott recalls a conversation with a Filipino hydrologist about the fact that the Colorado river no longer reaches the Sea of Cortez. Scott suggests that it is “sad, given all our poems about rivers running down to the sea, that the Colorado was prevented from achieving its destiny”. The hydrologist has no time for such fancy. “No, no, no! It is not a sad thing at all! It is wonderful; it means that all the water in the Colorado is used for important human purposes and not a drop is wasted!” All over the world people treat rivers as a resource for the taking—of hydroelectric power or of sustenance—or for the taking-away of often noxious effluent. When they are not taking, Scott points out, they are taming. States seek to control the rivers whose past floods produced rich alluvial soils, lest future floods should flow free again.

Streams of consciousness

The first of the three explorations that make up Dr Macfarlane’s book is to a place where the rights-based approach has won a signal victory. He hikes up to the Ecuadorian source of the Río Los Cedros, a river which the country’s constitutional court has recognised as having “the greatest possible legal protection that a constitution can grant: the recognition of rights inherent to a subject”. He subsequently visits the moribund reaches of the Cooum, the Adyar and the Kosasthalaiyar as they pass through the city of Chennai before heading to Canada, where he paddles down the white waters of Mutehekau Shipu, one of only two large rivers in Quebec which remains almost completely undammed. Its right to remain so is being fought for.

Through a mixture of storytelling, argument and rhetoric, supplemented with a touch of derring-do, Dr Macfarlane makes an environmental, ethical and aesthetic case for rivers being living subjects that must be endowed with rights. The book’s true strength, though, comes from his knowledge that it is not enough. In one of his rare moments of cynicism he lays bare the bathos inherent in lawyers competing for the right to ventriloquise a river’s needs “in a kind of cosplay animism”. The life of rivers is not something to be granted to them; it is something to be learned from them. To gain such understanding means opening lines of communication. Dr Macfarlane wants this book to be just such a seemingly impossible conduit.

Rivers cannot read books. But Dr Macfarlane believes they can write them. It is by explicitly treating them as his co-authors that he makes the book theirs as well as his; they become participants in the writing of its and their and his stories. The humans he travels with—an unassuming judge, a grieving mycologist, a wounded activist and a profoundly unusual man called Wayne, among others—provide him with ways of understanding the rivers. The rivers, in turn, provide the reader with ways of understanding the humans. The sense of what life is expands.

This approach governs not just what the book says, but the wonderfully fashioned ways in which it says it. Assuredly deployed assonance and an ear for metre make the flow of individual sentences a joy; the occasional deployment of neologism and esoteric but apt vocabulary, along with a taste for anthimeria, punctuate that flow with ripples and reverses. Scales shift to sublime effect: some passages reveal the book as a whole in microcosm; others echo out to encompass vast reaches of time and space. Dr Macfarlane deploys his long-recognised formidable talent with consummate skill and also, crucially, sincerity. His mastery of technique never feels merely technical; it feels head-in-white-water-breathtakingly heartfelt. His sense of duty to his co-authors demands nothing less.

Other books provide critiques of the way that humans, through their states and corporations, use, abuse and mismanage rivers: Scott’s does so with scholarship and vigour. Dr Macfarlane’s goes further. Everyone who has ever found something to love in a river should find something to love in this book. It is a masterpiece. ■

A peek into the world of wasps

Wasps.

Waspie - a narrow corseted waist. 

Waspish - kind of quick to anger and irritation.  (My state quite often to be honest) 

WASP - White Anglo Saxon Protestant - considered to be one of the most powerful groups in the US.

I am wary of these paper wasps that are nesting outside our study window.  I treat them respectfully.  The nest has grown in size, in front of my very eyes.

They haven't troubled us so far, and we have left them alone. I see them going to the flowers in my balcony and feeding on the nectar in the Kopsia flowers.

And yet, so little do I know about these winged insects.  The MNS Wasp Walk on 26th April was a perfect Wasp 101 then.  Who better than Yuvan to tell us all about these insects.

I did not know - 

Wasps are powerful.

Pest controllers
Pollinators
Paralysers
Proficient architects designers
Progressive Provisioners  

Parasitoid Proliferators

Not necessarily stingers.

 

 

Our walk started at the rear of the TS library, where each window and every ledge had a story to be told.

 

There were solitary yellow mud daubers that made mud nests, with an egg a chamber.  The brilliant  metallic flashes of the Blue mud dauber, that can repurpose abandoned nests, cleaning them out before occupying them, 

 

Potterwasps with their small individual "pots" - there was one such in my mother's window frame, I remember - that she preserved for the longest time, until my father passed on, and it could not be protected.  The losses and the absences intertwined in my mind.

 

Her garden also has sand wasps whose company I kept through Covid lockdown. 
 

Anyways, back to the walk and the library walls.  

Blue Mud-dauber Wasp (Chalybion bengalense) - Photo by Hrishu

Yuvan explained that these Chalybion genus  wasps will use old wasp nests, softening them with water, and then they don't look so well built - as you can see - and they zombiefy spiders, lay eggs on them and seal the cell with lime from our building walls (the white cap you see).  Meanwhile the egg hatches, the larva will munch on the spiders, pupate and then when ready to emerge as an adult, will chew through that lime cap and emerge!!    It truly sounds like a Sci Fi story -  Alien with Sigourney Weaver - and here I thought there was some imagination at work, instead it is the story of wasps on a grander scale, where instead of the zombie spiders there are zombie humans.  

We came around the building and headed for the Premna tree which is another favourite of wasps - Yuvan mentioned how one morning they identified 40 species of wasps on a flowering Premna!  As we waited, for the sun to fall on the tree and wasp activity to increase, I looked at the other trees around.   The Rangoon Creeper was in full bloom as was the Neem with its delicate white flowers, the  Adenanthera pavonina was in pods that were still green, the Weeping Fig had fruits, making it look like a Maghizham, and the tamarind trees were heavy with ripening fruit that I eyed longingly. 

I saw a Black Pearl tree for the first time in bloom.  Those blue-black seeds standing out against the sky.

We wandered around the lily pond, watching the Stingless bees buzz around the lily that looked like it was lit from within.

As we returned to the Premna, the wasp action was heating up.  Yuvan also filled us in with so many incredible facts about these insects.

• All species of insects have a parasitoid wasp that attacks their eggs, larva and adults - and so wasps are the biggest natural "pesticide" or bio-control agents, if you will call it that.  If there were no wasps, there would be much more crop destruction.  Experiments have been done to introduce wasps as pest controllers and result have been encouraging.
• The paper wasps breakdown of celluose and plant fiber was the inspration for paper-making starting in China and there is some relation to the first attempts at ink as well. 
• I learnt about the work of Prof Raghavendra Gadagkar of the IISc, who has studied the paper wasps (similar to the ones outside my window) and eusocial behavior among insects.  Some esoteric concepts of how the Queen wasp becomes the queen wasp more by pheromone control rather than by aggression.  I looked up the professor and came across this great talk Inside the Wasp Nest: Understanding Insect Societies where he describes how ants, bees, wasps and termites live in complex societies, and how the Ropalidia marginata society is unique in the way they choose their queen, without a nest-wide aggression.  I was fascinated with the "common sense" experimental designs that he explains - from paint-tagging wasps to identify and differentiate (since they all look the same including the queen) to creating mesh barriers and removing the queen and putting her back.
• Yuvan mentioned JH Tumlinson, whom I looked up - he has worked on insect-plant interactions and the role of chemical signals in these interactions, especially with wasps.  He has studied how plants respond to herbivore damage and how insects exploit plant signals for finding hosts or defenses.  All pretty cool stuff.  Among his entomological findings were that plants attacked by feeding insects have the capability to synthesize and release volatile organic chemicals.  These chemicals  then attract small parasitoid wasps, that in turn locate and parasitize the caterpillars.  This "wasp calling" synamone chemical  of the plant is induced by compounds in the oral secretion of the caterpillars.
• Tumlinson passed away in 2022, but he has mentored many students in the area of wasps and Ted Turlings is one such, and he's working on the synamones emitted by maize that "call" the specific parasitoid wasp to rescue it from the caterpillars! (He's also a birdwatcher in his spare time, I like that!)

Back to the Premna then, where the action had begun.  Yuvan would point to various flitting creatures and reel off various names.  I managed to spot a few, but many moved too fast for me, and I was my usual plaintive self, asking where, where and being told oh it just flew off to the rear branch or it just moved out of sight.

 

But Hrishu and Girish got some great photos.  Girish is till giving me photos, but here are some of Hrishu's.

 

This photo by Hrishu of a Spider Wasp - they hunt spiders.  I did see this with my binoculars.

The Ammophila sand wasp which obliged us by staying still, so we all got a good look.  Generative AI informes me that - "Ammophila wasps are known for their unique nesting behavior, including provisioning their burrows with paralyzed caterpillars for their larvae."  (Yuvan mentioned it, but I had forgotten it in the information overload of the morning.). Hrishu's photo

 

Photo by Hrishu of Orange spotted flower wasp that I sadly missed. 

There were other bees, spiders  and moths that were spotted but I shall ignore them for the moment and end with the Robber fly that was pretty spectacularly perched.

 

I was very pleased as I managed to actually "see" and locate this Assasin fly on that far away branch, and was not at the receving end of Hrishu and Girish directional instruction to tell Elu where it was.  It is definitely easier with birds!  Hrishu's photo shows the powerfully built robber fly with a honey bee prey that it was probably sucking away from the inside.  It has probably injected the bee with saliva containing neurotoxic enzymes which has paralyzed the bee and will soon digest the insides also; the fly then sucks the liquefied bee's innards through the proboscis. Oops - there's another scifi story scenario.

 

Soon it was time to leave and even though I was sweating buckets in the humidity and stillness of the April morning, the wasps had kept me engrossed.

 

 I am sure more wasp posts will get blogged, as I document the paper wasps inspired by this session.  Thanks to MNS and Yuvan.

And thanks to Yuvan and the Palluyir team for this very handy book with great pictures and simple writing in English and Tamil.

 

 

MNS member Venky Ramaswamy said:

It was wonderful to meet Yuvan Aves for the very first time at the Wasp Walk yesterday! After a brief, we were then introduced to building of nests by wasps – on the walls, below the ceilings, underneath the sun-shades, and on the wooden frames of the windows, etc. I have destroyed many of these nests, many a times during my lifetime, with almost negligible knowledge. One of the key messages I picked up from today’s walk was the phenomenal contribution of the wasps to the society, and the need to appreciate their crucial roles, and learn to co-exist. Yuvan stood in front of a small tree, with bright green leaves, white flowers, and tiny fluorescent fruit bloom. It was Premna Serratifolia. During one of his wasp surveys on the campus, he observed forty different species of wasps, pollinating this tree. Every direction he was pointing, we
 
were zooming in our cameras and binoculars. Yuvan was full of information and we were overwhelmed by his vast, oops...wasp knowledge! Wealth of information about how plants communicate with wasps, presence of flower wasps indicate the quality of soil, and also act as an amazing pollinator, memory guilds of greater banded hornet and its reference in Agananuru – a classical Tamil poetic work of Sangam literature, and so on. The session almost came to an end, with a Vaa Ma Minnal punch, when we were pointed to watch an act of courtship behavior of paper wasps! It was an awesome learning experience. Best Wishes Yuvan. Thanks to Palluyir Trust Team, for the amazing book with extensive research on Wasps. Kudos!

There are clear photos of the wasps that I commonly see, as also wasp nests.  The book is available as a free download here.

There was a second wasp walk on the 3rd of May, where Arvind and Jomi kept another bunch of members enthralled, and Sagarika's pictures are here.

 

She says:

 

On a sultry May morning, 18 of us nature enthusiasts gathered at the library gate for a wasp walk led by two young naturalists, Aravind and Jomi. Aravind opened the walk by highlighting the stark contrast in how we view two vital pollinators - bees are cherished, wasps on the other hand, are often feared and despised.

During the walk, we learned about the true democratic aspects of wasp societies, their nest- building behaviour, their stings and more. Karna and Tarun, two young participants, asked insightful questions throughout, keeping everyone engaged and Aravind on his toes.

We explored the remarkable diversity of wasp nests—each unique in location and material. Highlights included the nests of cluster wasps, tube-maker and ridged-nest potter wasps (the latter using a cement-like substance), and a blue mud dauber nest tucked inside an old lock’s keyhole. As we searched for sand wasps, some of us spotted a striking velvet ant (which, despite its name, is actually a type of wasp), clearly the highlight of the day.

We also enjoyed observing Ammophila, which, due to its size, was easy to spot and photograph. Several Vespidae wasps zipped overhead, becoming more active as the sun grew stronger.

Fascinating facts flowed throughout the walk—like how some plants release chemicals to attract wasps for pollination, even without insect threats, and how parasitoid wasps earn their name as they ultimately end up killing their hosts- good for pest/insect control I thought.

The wasp walk was both fun and enlightening, highlighting the vital role of wasps in the ecosystem and helping us appreciate these misunderstood creatures.

Now, if the Velvet ant is a wasp, then why call it an ant?  It is confusing as it is, and mimicry in the natural world is rife, but we humans can atleast name them appropriately can't we?  Just saying.