The hornbills that I did not see

The hornbills eluded us on our January trip to Parambikulam. According to this article, in The Hindu, Hornbills are now nesting at karian shola. However, if we go now, we wont be allowed into the shola itself, the article says, and since I enjoyed those forests so much, its ok that we didnt see the hornbills, in retrospect!

After cleaning up the traditional nests in January, hornbills have, since February, started nesting eggs in tree cavities deep inside the jungles in Karian Shola near Top Slip in the Anamalai Tiger Reserve (ATR).

The chicks are expected to hatch out by the end of May or June.

While there is sustained focus on conservation of tigers and protection of herbivores that serve as a prey base for the carnivores, the multiplying of hornbills is also happening within the ATR.

Two species of hornbills found in this part of Western Ghats are Great Pied Hornbill (Buceros Bicornis) and Malabar Grey Hornbill (Ocyceros griseus).

“We have spotted close to 25 nests in the thick forests of Karian Shola,” Range Officer of Ulandy– Top Slip range S. Thangaraj Panneerselvam said.

Shy bird

Since the hornbill is a very shy bird, forest officials have denied trekking permission for tourists and access to Karian Shola even for naturalists.

“We do not want the nesting or the feeding of the female bird by the male bird to be disturbed. There is instruction to this effect from Field Director of ATR H. Basavaraju,” the Range Officer said.

Any disturbance will result in the male bird keeping away from the nest and this may cause the death of the female and the chicks as it is the male that brings them food.

Traditional nests

When it comes to nesting, the hornbills occupy only the traditional nests, which are typical hollows in tall trees in rainforests.

The same hollow is the nest year after year. It is abandoned only if the trees fall or any form of severe disturbance.

If barks grow and cover the nests used last year, look for another nesting place. The one with a narrow opening is taken over by the Malabar Grey Hornbill, which is smaller than the Great Pied Hornbill.

The nests are cleaned after surveillance for nearly a day to ascertain the presence of predators. It is done in January and nesting begins in February. The incubation period is 90 days.

Creates a quilt

Once the female bird gets into the nest, it sheds its feathers to create a quilt and on nesting the eggs, it covers the cavity with a paste made of its excrement and mud.

Hornbills normally hatch one or two eggs. To ward off ant threat to the eggs, it will keep its beak at the opening.

It is a rare sight to spot the male feeding the nesting female. The male passes food to the female through the slit that allows space only for the beak to pass.

The male bird will keep feeding the female with ficus fruits. A fortnight after hatching the eggs, the female will come out breaking the covering made of excrement and mud.

The chicks then cover the cavity and bring down the size of the opening. Male and female Hornbills then feed them with food such as snakes and lizards.

No open flying

Subsequently, for three or four days, the male and female hornbills will engage themselves in teaching flying to the chicks. The hornbills will never allow the chicks to fly in the open owing to the threat from black eagles, hawk eagles, black owl and hawk owl.

Despite such protective delivery and post-natal care, the survival rate of the hornbills is hardly 10 per cent to 15 per cent. However, of late, the population is healthy in the ATR areas.

Karian Shola was proving to be one of the best breeding sites for the hornbills, Mr. Panneerselvam said.


Forest officials have denied trekking permission for tourists
The incubation period is 90 days

An escape story that ends sadly and badly

We saw the Top Slip elephants on our Pongal trip to Parambikulam. I asked if they were sad to be chained. I wonder which one of the magnificent elephants we saw was Kartik.

Elephant escapes from Top Slip camp, search on
TNN, Feb 24, 2011, 05.38am IST

COIMBATORE: A 35-year-old tusker has escaped from the elephant camp at Top Slip near Pollachi in Coimbatore district.

It slipped out of the camp on Monday night and is hiding in the bushes near Sethumadai, a little away from the reserve forest area. The tusker, Karthik is going through "must" and may have gone in search of a female companion, S Thangaraj, a forest ranger at Top Slip, told The Times of India.

Normally, the elephants at the training camp are not bound by chain at night. They're let loose in the forests. In the mornings, they return to the camp. "Elephants have never slipped out of the camp in the last decade," said Thangaraj.

The mahout and forest guards launched a massive search for the animal on Tuesday. They spotted him at a tribal settlement in Saralapathy near Sethumadai on Wednesday morning. When the mahout Murugan walked closer to the tusker, the animal ran deeper into the jungles. His female companion, Sivakami, and another tusker were brought in to lure him back into the camp. "But he is refusing to come out of the bushes," Thangaraj said.

By dusk, the "rescue operation" was called off. Now, forest officials are trying to trap Karthik with two other female elephants in the camp. "He relates well to our camp elephants Vijayalakshmi and Selvi. We hope Karthik will come back tomorrow," the official said.

Karthik was born in the Top Slip camp to Alamelu, who died a few years ago. When wild tuskers stray away from jungle, Karthik usually goes as a kumkhi elephant to drive them back. There are 20 elephants in the Top Slip camp.

Jumbo that escaped from camp gored to death by wild tusker
Radha Venkatesan | TNN, Feb 25th
Coimbatore: In a fierce territorial fight in the jungles, a male elephant which escaped from the elephant camp at Top Slip near Pollachi was gored by a wild tusker on Thursday morning. The 35-year-old camp elephant, Karthik, was found dead with multiple bleeding injuries at Saralapathy near Sethumadai, about 5 km from the scenic hill retreat of Top Slip.

“His body was covered with bleeding wounds. He was gored to death in a fierce fight with a large wild tusker,” Top Slip forest ranger, Thangaraj Paneerselvam told TOI.

Forest guards who had waited on the forest fringes to bring back the tusker to the camp, could hear loud trumpeting all through Wednesday night. Around 4am on Thursday, the trumpeting stopped.

“We knew Karthik was in trouble. But when we went into the jungles, it was too late,” Karthik’s mahout Murugan said. When a camp elephant strays into forests, it cannot co-exist with wild elephants. “A camp elephant is no match for a wild tusker. The tusker is fiercely territorial and will not allow camp elephants to invade his space,” the forest official said. Karthik was born in the elephant camp about 35 years ago and was a “kumkhi” elephant.

On Monday night, suffering from hormonal surges, he left the camp. Forest guards and mahouts launched a massive hunt in the jungles to locate him.

After a day-long search, they spotted him near a tribal settlement at Saralapatty. However, he refused to respond to the calls of his mahout. So, a female elephant, Sivakami, and another tusker from the Kozhikamudi camp were brought to lure him out of the jungles.

But Karthik stubbornly ignored the overtures of Sivakami and ran deeper into the jungles. On Wednesday evening, the forest personnel decided to bring two more female elephants to draw Karthik back to the camp. “Unfortunately, by this time, Karthik had succumbed in a terrain battle. The tusker which attacked him was also experiencing hormonal surges,” forest guards said.

Two years ago, two elephants in the camp fought a fierce battle and one of them died after suffering severe abdominal injuries. Last week, a tiger and a leopard died in a territorial fight in the Nilgiris forests.

radha.venkatesan@timesgroup.com

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.

The Parambikulam poem

Frogmouths and hornbills I hoped to see
but the forest teaches you
that what will be, will be.

Parambikulam was our destination,
in our MNS Pongal peregrination.
Up in the Western Ghats is the sanctuary,
a hot spot of floral and faunal diversity.
A 450 year old teak called kanimara
A Southern Birdwing, I marveled at. The shola
Do we realize we have this treasure,
Its worth to us, beyond measure?

Lost New Yorkers and Naturalists seasoned,

a doc on sabbatical and a writer of fiction,

researcher retired, the children enlivened,

our MNS "herd', a local attraction!

Roshan amused us with snake lores galore

Rohan wanted idlis and puris, some more

Uttara yelled in the cold shower with "delight"

and Vish thought she was in a big fight!

Then, Selvam guided us to the frogmouth pair,
An endemic to the ghats, in their lair.
What an endearing sight they made
Leaf-like, in order to detection, evade.

That large, strange gape helps them hunt at night,

Below the forest canopy in quiet flight.
This Youtube video shows you the frogmouth, Sri Lanka
As also this post in my favourite blog from Gallicissa.

While Pranav continued his quest for crawlies,

Vijay thought we would have leech difficulties,

But instead, Mini had ticks more than forty!

Which her dad picked out, before they turned warty.

He also removed the dead rat from our loo

While Dhruva was revealing sides to us we never knew!

Meanwhile, Raji & Raji discussed music and dance

with Kamini, in this most unlikely ambience.

Outside the dorm was the Malabar Whistling Thrush
Its plaintive call heard from the brush.
An Asian Fairy Bluebird, and woodpeckers a plenty
Nut Hatch, treepie, barbets and hill mynahs, more than twenty!
And boars sporting mohawks, their snouts a-twitching
And Nilgiri langurs, their black coats, so fetching!

The gaurs and hornbills decided to keep away

though we looked hard, day after day.

Sheila was fascinated with all the scat

Porcupine, bear, boar and cat!

Mr Sivakumar's record shot did not help resolve the debate

was that Wagtail grey or yellow, my mate?

Shantaram and me made bird lists, meticulous

In this way, it was not left ambiguous.

Eighty two bird species in all we sighted

And tree names also were noted.

Memories of those vistas, I will carry with me

friends, family and happy camaraderie

forest, flower, bird, animal and tree

how I wish we could all let them be.

Let me learn to consume wisely

be responsible and not exploit blithely.

Clean air and freshwater free

For our children and grandchildren and all eternity.

Ten bird species I had never seen before -

• Pompadour green pigeon - what a lovely, musical call!
• Sri Lanka Frogmouth - I was so looking forward to this, and when I think about them now, it still amazes me. If the guide had not actually told me where to look, I just would not have seen them!
• Brown capped pygymy woodpecker - there were actually a couple in the trees just outside the dorm, so one morning I had my heart's fill of viewing them zipping from tree to tree.
• Great black/white-bellied woodpecker - what an amazing, spectacular looking bird!
• Heart-spotted woodpecker - brought a smile to all of us I remember, as he/she pecked furiously and went round and round the trunk, hanging upside down at some point, but still pecking away.
• Small minivets - brilliant flashes of colour
• White-bellied treepie - The white nape and belly, striking when it flew past
• Velvet-fronted Nuthatch - out in the forest, it kept disappearing around the tree trunk, but I had a good look in the trees outside the dorm as well. When my son first heard the name, he heard it as "natraj", and was amazed that the bird had such an Indian name!!
• Asian Fairy Bluebird - It posed for us, like some fashion model on the Vogue cover! With the sun falling on it, it was a brilliant view!
• Chestnut Tailed Starling - there was a tree full of them one evening.

Memorable butterflies

• Southern birdwing
• Jezebel
• Gladeye bushbrown