Balcony birding

Coppersmith barbet - Megalaima haemacephala

The bare millingtonia

Bobbing head

Tuk, tuk, tuk

all day long.

White-breasted kingfisher - Halcyon smyrnensis

The bare millingtonia

Beak so sharp

Chakee-ake-ake-ake

all day long.

Stinging and biting hazards!

When Rom first visited Agumbe in the early 1970s he had some peculiar hippie ideas. He felt that all the trappings of the human world interfered with his ability to find king cobras. So, he discarded his watch and shoes, and stripped down to his loin cloth. Not the best attire for his first brush with the Devil Nettle!

He got it on his arms, chest, stomach and legs. “It was itchy painful,” he recalls. Hives erupted, and to alleviate the pain he dove into a pool. It became doubly horrendous and he jumped out again. That night he shivered uncontrollably. By the next morning, the hives had become depressions and the affected area was constantly clammy. For the following six months, any contact with water was enough to set off the ‘itchy pain' again.

Read more about the Devil Nettle in this delightful essay by Janaki Lenin. It is found in the Western Ghats. The Hindu : FEATURES / METRO PLUS : Innocent plant, deadly sting

I am glad we did not come across these in our walks in the karian shola at Parambikulam. The plant picture in The Hindu essay looks most innocuous!

While we did not get stung by nettle, a few of the group members had ticks on them, while others (including me) had chigger bites! Forewarned about leeches, we were resplendent in our leech socks, much to the amusement of our guides, who mentioned mildly several times, that there were no leeches at the moment since they had had a spell of dry weather.

On our return to Madras, I was absent-mindedly scratching my ankles, and looked down to see some red, mosquito-like itch marks. Sheila also said she had some and then husband and son also had these marks. However, we did not see any insect biting us, though we peered closely and examined our limbs thoroughly - I only found more unwanted warts and moles that I never knew I had!

Sheila's sister then mentioned to her that they may be "chigger bites", so off we went to figure out what this was (Google zindabad!) and discovered that chiggers were the larvae of a type of mite, and they were almost microscopic! To our relief (I had heard some worrying stories about tick bites and mysterious fevers), these were not ticks, and besides the itching, we could ignore it.

That is what we did - tried not to scratch, kept the skin clean, and now two weeks later, those little welts have dried, and the itching is gone.

Mites are arachnids, like ticks, but are much, much smaller, almost microscopic. Ticks are larger - I remember the ones that use to plague our dogs. If I'm not mistaken, ticks feed on blood of the host, while mites feed on lymph tissue, if they are parasitic. Ticks are also more troublesome in that they carry diseases, and so one has to keep a close eye out for them. Mites, it appears, lead to allergies, but many, (like the ones we were bitten by), can be ignored in that the discomfort is temporary and without any other implications.

Here are some other arachnids we saw in the Parambikulam area.

Argiope anasuja. Photo by Junior, with his 35mm Nikon camera and manual focus

The same argiope, taken by me with the Panasonic Lumix on autofocus. I struggled to get it into focus, as the camera "autofocussed on everything else besides this spider! Reminded me of Dr TPA and the Photography workshop I attended.

I first wrote about this argiope, when I saw it at the PWD park in 2009!

I think this is the Opadometa fastigata, with silver patches across the body

Gasteracantha geminata. A common spider of Kerala

And then we saw this "exoskeleton". Actually Pranav did, and showed it to all of us. So, the spider does not have an internal skeleton but one like an external shield. And when it grows, it bursts out of the old one and grows a new one!

I've often wondered why we find spiders on their backs, with their legs curled up. Check out this link for the reason.

Happy and free. Chained and sad?

As I saw the wonderful scenes of jubilation in Tahrir Square in Cairo, I once again appreciated my basic civil liberties. Would I rather live in chaotic, inefficient but democratic India, or controlled and advanced China? Would I enjoy being a princess in a gilded cage- like castle or an ordinary citizen free to roam the streets and markets of my land?

Similarly, would the elephants prefer the freedom of the forests to the luxuries of being fed and bathed (never mind the chains) of camp life? On our recent visit to Parambikulam, I saw elephants in the wild, and they were definitely smiling I tell you. And then, there were the sad eyes of the Top Slip elephant camp inmates.

A smiling mum and her baby, all mud bathed

To be wild and free

The sad face of a camp elephant. Why do their trunks and ears look so "scrubbed"?



Those horrible, horrible chains...like prisoners

It is no wonder that this elephant in the wild walked off into the forest on seeing us. They cannot possibly view us with ease. Click on the photo and look in the centre you will see an elephant

I dont like zoos and I dont like elephants in camps. The worst off are the temple elephants. I saw a couple of temple elephantsa few months ago...and my heart just went in to my stomach on seeing their plight. Instead of praying, I silently asked for that magnificent creature's forgiveness.

It is no wonder that in their collective unconscious these animals are angry at us...

Wild boars of Parambikulam

So, what is a social group of wild boars called?

"Sounders", says Wikipedia!

Everyone had good sightings of sounders of wild boars at Parambikulam. One lot trudged past our dormitory morning and evening, their snouts in the ground foraging for anything they could find to eat. They really do eat anything edible I believe - omnivores of the highest order!
Nice mohawk isn't it?
Occasionally, they would lift their snouts and sniff out our alien presence, which I thought was rather endearing.

They are fierce creatures, though, and I've heard stories of MNS members being charged by them. Sudhakar gave us a particularly graphic account of being stuck in a nullah within eyeball distance of one, with both man and boar wanting to flee. (He straddled the walls of the nullah and the boar went charging through the tunnel of his legs!!)

Wikipedia says:

If surprised or cornered, a boar (particularly a sow with her piglets) can and will defend itself and its young with intense vigor. The male lowers its head, charges, and then slashes upward with his tusks. The female, whose tusks are not visible, charges with her head up, mouth wide, and bites. Such attacks are not often fatal to humans, but may result in severe trauma, dismemberment, or blood loss.

The greatest headbanger of them all

Having just seen all those woodpeckers in Parambikulam crazily banging their heads, I thought this article was very well-timed!

Woodpecker's head inspires shock absorbers

"A woodpecker's head experiences decelerations of 1200g as it drums on a tree at up to 22 times per second. Humans are often left concussed if they experience 80 to 100g, so how the woodpecker avoids brain damage was unclear. So Sang-Hee Yoon and Sungmin Park of the University of California, Berkeley, studied video and CT scans of the bird's head and neck and found that it has four structures that absorb mechanical shock.

These are its
hard-but-elastic beak;
a sinewy, springy tongue-supporting structure that extends behind the skull called the hyoid;
an area of spongy bone in its skull;
and the way the skull and cerebrospinal fluid interact to suppress vibration."

Read the article for more details.