Winter visitor on a wire

Blue-tailed bee-eater (Merops philippinus) - winter visitor

Season Watch - Porana volubis again

A Photo essay.  Continued from here.  

And the brilliance of the mallow.

PTJ redux

Beautiful capture of Jacanas with a new born chick by Mr Ramanan.  Mr Ramanan's photo essay from the 2017 breeding season is here.  

I went looking for them a few days later with Sheila, and while we did not see the eggs (they had probably all hatched), we saw what was in all likelihood, the third chick.

When we reached, we heard the male PTJ calling in agitation and looking eft and right.  It appeared that he was calling the chicks.  Initially, we saw a slightly larger chick, which subsequently we did not see at all.  (I have read that when they hear an alarm call from the parent, the chicks hide under a floating leaf.  I wonder if that is what it did!

We did spy a littler chick, unsteady on his feet, which seemed to follow the parent, and I marvelled at how they stayed afloat and knew instinctively that they had to put their feet on the leaves and not in the water.  All the time we were there, it was not fed by any parent, unlike other bird chicks, who are constantly crying for food.

The wetlands was filled with the calls of the jacanas, the honks of moorhens, interspersed with the impatient school bus and a motorcycle driving by.  

I was dismayed at the amount of construction that is going on in the marsh.

Its a completely bizarre and distressing site.  There are homes, apartments even, and raised roads, while all the empty plots are filled with water, reeds and remnants of marshland.  It seems insane to come and build here, and even more insane to buy and live here.

The birds are returning to Arunachala

... Enough to warrant a book.

Arun is the kind of modern super hero the world needs. A green warrior who has let his actions speak.  And Chennai's loss is Tiruvannamalai's gain.  He has mobilised and focussed native tree replanting on the hill, along with the prompt dousing of forest fires, and the results are beginning to show, as a forest and an ecosystem comes back to life.

And the returning birds have played their part, dispersing seeds and exponentially leading to forest revival.

The book, published by The Forest Way Trust this year on recycled paper, lists over two hundred species of birds that now can be seen in a 10 km radius around the hill and in the water bodies.  The restoration has been supported by the district administration as well.

Hearing Arun speak about the revival of streams, the local communities working to put out the fires and the survival rate (some 1%) of planted trees, brings home the efforts that have led to this.

In the Introduction to the book, is a paragraph that I particularly like:

But while we humans may feel proud of our efforts to reforest the mountain, thinking that we have proved a home for birds in the process, the truth is that birds themselves have done far more to reforest the Hill than us.  Many of the trees that we see now growing on the mountains were not planted, but came naturally, and it is often the birds that spread the seeds.  And because they can fly, it is possible for birds to bring seeds a good distance from other forest areas, thus increasing the plant diversity of each place.  With this, many forest birds not seen here in living memory, have made their return, like the wonderful Racket-tailed Drone.  This is the most important lesson that we all must learn from nature; that other animals live their lives while making their home a better place for other life too.

All the original artworks in the book are photographs of paintings dome by Tiruvannamalai artist Kumar on limestone slabs in the Arunagiri Forest Park, at the base of Arunachala.

The book introduces Kumar, who began his association in the project as an artist painting birds, and has now become an expert birdwatcher.

Louvre Abu Dhabi again

Continued from here.  

The marble bust of a bedouin chief stared gravely down upon me.  I loved the careless folds of his shawl

And Da Vinci's La Belle Ferroniere fixed me with an even more piercing stare.
I stared back, no hurry, no  jostling crowds, trying to figure what makes a Da Vinci so special.
This is the only one of his 15 paintings outside of Europe.
This museum has bought Salvatore Mundi as well.

What are the odds of coming across 9,000 year old neolithic statues from Ain Ghazal in
two museums in two different countries?  I had just beaten those odds. I had seen
them at the antiquities museum at Jordan and now here again I was face-to-face
with the two-headed beauties.

A museum is a wonderful place, in general, and so too the Louvre at Abu Dhabi.  It is not crammed to the gills with stuff, and some of it is quirky and odd. Like this statuette of female fertility from the early villages gallery.  There was
one of a Bactrian princess which is also ancient.

The influence of the French museum collection was evident in the presence of these two paintings.

Portrait of King Louis XIV, Rene-Antoine Houasse, oil on canvas, 1674

Napolean crossing the Alps.  by Jacques-Louis David.  He painted five versions of this,
believe it or not - a precursor to today's clients requiring colour options - the versions
differing in colour of horse, sash, as also the look on his face.  I gathered that is the Second
Versailles version.

A Chinese dragon, A Chola beauty and a prince from Lagash

This bronzed winged dragon from the 3rd century BC was a beauty

... as was this Chola bronze, 

and this black stone carving of Gudea, the prince of the
Kingdom of Lagash, south of Mesopotamia, (modern
Iraq)  Dated at 2120BCE, the diorite stone is
believed to have been imported from the Oman
peninsula.

The floor was cross-crossed with a place-names map

"Young Emir Studying" - Osman Hamdy bey, from Istanbul in 1878

On loan from the Musée d’Orsay:​​​​Vincent Van Gogh’s Self Portrait, 1887

Edouard Manet - one of his Gyspy series

Hans Holbein's portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt

And the Picassos!

Matisse

Kandinsky

Piet Mondrian caught my eye because of my aunt

"The Residence of  a Sugarcane planter in Brazil" - by the Dutch painter Frans Post, reminded me of home.

And the three W's - Walden, Warhol and the Whistler

The Docks of Cardiff - Lionel Walden.  I loved this one.

"Big Electric Hair" - Warhol, again this is a series, in many colours.

Whistler's Mother

A Koran and a Tora sat close to each other.

Chinese screens

And Japanese ones too

Egyptian frieze

An Islamic frieze of Quranic verses  in sandstone , from the Ghazni empire, about AD 1200

And Durga, Krishna and Maithreya too

The description read, "Between the 5th and 15th centuries, India was a leading creative centre in the domain of religious sculpture.  The lives of venerated individuals were illustrated in works produced to accompany the spread of Buddhism and Hinduism into Central Asia, and from South-East Asia, into China, Korea and Japan.  Their purpose was to encourage meditation by devotees and their encounter with the divine."

A Chola dynasty granite Durga, 12th century

A Krishna painting - supposedly they have a 150 Krishna paintings, which they will display in rotation!!

Maithreya, from the Gandhara period.

So much more - The Horses of the Sun, Cy Twombly's series in blue, Alexander the Great's bust (what's remaining of it actually), cuneiform, Isis, Chinese pottery, Japanese Edo paintings of Mt Fuji.....

I would love to go back, potter around the Cosmology gallery a bit more maybe, see the Bactrian princess again, and my little female statuette from south America  ...  and probably Salvatore Mundi will be displayed.

Peaceful exhilaration

Today, I visited my mother's garden for a special reason.  The Horse Tail creeper is in bloom and that is an annual event not to be missed, for it is brief, spectacular and never fails to delight me.

For 350 days in the year, the vine is like a dark green curtain, cocooning my parents from the squat cement wall of the neighbours.  And then for a couple of weeks every year, the vine blooms.  And how!

Usually, the two weeks are in January, sometimes even February, but here we are this year, in December, with a poor monsoon, and some clock in the plant has struck the blooming hour.

Porana volubilis, of the Convolvulaceae family - Horse tail creeper in bloom

Do the bees feel the awe and delight that I do, I wondered as I quietly watched them flit from flower to flower. Somewhere, a honeycomb was being filled with sweet nectar from my mother’s garden.

Exuberant bunches, swathes of white, sweet fragrance, the drama of it all.

The softly falling petals. So much beauty. So temporary. So mortal. In a few days, maybe even tomorrow, they will be a memory.

The wild mallow seemed to keep a watch.

Until next season then, I bade goodbye to the blooms.