Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR

Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR

10:10 am

February 29, 2012

 

by Robert Krulwich

No, this isn't a make-believe place. It's real.

John White

They call it "Ball's Pyramid." It's what's left of an old volcano that emerged from the sea about 7 million years ago. A British naval officer named Ball was the first European to see it in 1788. It sits off Australia, in the South Pacific. It is extremely narrow, 1,844 feet high, and it sits alone.
What's more, for years this place had a secret. At 225 feet above sea level, hanging on the rock surface, there is a small, spindly little bush, and under that bush, a few years ago, two climbers, working in the dark, found something totally improbable hiding in the soil below. How it got there, we still don't know.

Google Maps A satellite view of Ball's Pyramid in the Tasman Sea off the eastern coast of Australia.

Here's the story: About 13 miles from this spindle of rock, there's a bigger island, called Lord Howe Island.
On Lord Howe, there used to be an insect, famous for being big. It's a stick insect, a critter that masquerades as a piece of wood, and the Lord Howe Island version was so large — as big as a human hand — that the Europeans labeled it a "tree lobster" because of its size and hard, lobsterlike exoskeleton. It was 12 centimeters long and the heaviest flightless stick insect in the world. Local fishermen used to put them on fishing hooks and use them as bait.

Rod Morris/www.rodmorris.co.nz

  Then one day in 1918, a supply ship, the S.S. Makambo from Britain, ran aground at Lord Howe Island and had to be evacuated. One passenger drowned. The rest were put ashore. It took nine days to repair the Makambo, and during that time, some black rats managed to get from the ship to the island, where they instantly discovered a delicious new rat food: giant stick insects. Two years later, the rats were everywhere and the tree lobsters were gone.
Totally gone. After 1920, there wasn't a single sighting. By 1960, the Lord Howe stick insect, Dryococelus australis, was presumed extinct.
There was a rumor, though.

Credit: Stephanie d'Otreppe / NPR

Some climbers scaling Ball's Pyramid in the 1960s said they'd seen a few stick insect corpses lying on the rocks that looked "recently dead." But the species is nocturnal, and nobody wanted to scale the spire hunting for bugs in the dark.
Climbing The Pyramid

Fast forward to 2001, when two Australian scientists, David Priddel and Nicholas Carlile, with two assistants, decided to take a closer look. From the water, they'd seen a few patches of vegetation that just might support walking sticks. So, they boated over. ("Swimming would have been much easier," Carlile said, "but there are too many sharks.") They crawled up the vertical rock face to about 500 feet, where they found a few crickets, nothing special. But on their way down, on a precarious, unstable rock surface, they saw a single melaleuca bush peeping out of a crack and, underneath, what looked like fresh droppings of some large insect.
Where, they wondered, did that poop come from?
The only thing to do was to go back up after dark, with flashlights and cameras, to see if the pooper would be out taking a nighttime walk. Nick Carlile and a local ranger, Dean Hiscox, agreed to make the climb. And with flashlights, they scaled the wall till they reached the plant, and there, spread out on the bushy surface, were two enormous, shiny, black-looking bodies. And below those two, slithering into the muck, were more, and more ... 24 in all. All gathered near this one plant.

Patrick Honan

They were alive and, to Nick Carlile's eye, enormous. Looking at them, he said, "It felt like stepping back into the Jurassic age, when insects ruled the world."
They were Dryococelus australis. A search the next morning, and two years later, concluded these are the only ones on Ball's Pyramid, the last ones. They live there, and, as best we know, nowhere else.
How they got there is a mystery. Maybe they hitchhiked on birds, or traveled with fishermen, and how they survived for so long on just a single patch of plants, nobody knows either. The important thing, the scientists thought, was to get a few of these insects protected and into a breeding program.

Patrick Honan/Nick Carlile

That wasn't so easy. The Australian government didn't know if the animals on Ball's Pyramid could or should be moved. There were meetings, studies, two years passed, and finally officials agreed to allow four animals to be retrieved. Just four.
When the team went back to collect them, it turned out there had been a rock slide on the mountain, and at first they feared that the whole population had been wiped out. But when they got back up to the site, on Valentine's Day 2003, the animals were still there, sitting on and around their bush.
The plan was to take one pair and give it a man who was very familiar with mainland walking stick insects, a private breeder living in Sydney. He got his pair, but within two weeks, they died.
Adam And Eve And Patrick
That left the other two. They were named "Adam" and "Eve," taken to the Melbourne Zoo and placed with Patrick Honan, of the zoo's invertebrate conservation breeding group. At first, everything went well. Eve began laying little pea-shaped eggs, exactly as hoped. But then she got sick. According to biologist Jane Goodall, writing for Discover Magazine:

"Eve became very, very sick. Patrick ... worked every night for a month desperately trying to cure her. ... Eventually, based on gut instinct, Patrick concocted a mixture that included calcium and nectar and fed it to his patient, drop by drop, as she lay curled up in his hand."

Her recovery was almost instant. Patrick told the Australian Broadcasting Company, "She went from being on her back curled up in my hand, almost as good as dead, to being up and walking around within a couple of hours."
Eve's eggs were harvested, incubated (though it turns out only the first 30 were fertile) and became the foundation of the zoo's new population of walking sticks.

Matthew Bulbert/The Australian Museum

When Jane Goodall visited in 2008, Patrick showed her rows and rows of incubating eggs: 11,376 at that time, with about 700 adults in the captive population. Lord Howe Island walking sticks seem to pair off — an unusual insect behavior — and Goodall says Patrick "showed me photos of how they sleep at night, in pairs, the male with three of his legs protectively over the female beside him."
Now comes the question that bedevils all such conservation rescue stories. Once a rare animal is safe at the zoo, when can we release it back to the wild?
On Lord Howe Island, their former habitat, the great-great-great-grandkids of those original black rats are still out and about, presumably hungry and still a problem. Step one, therefore, would be to mount an intensive (and expensive) rat annihilation program. Residents would, no doubt, be happy to go rat-free, but not every Lord Howe islander wants to make the neighborhood safe for gigantic, hard-shell crawling insects. So the Melbourne Museum is mulling over a public relations campaign to make these insects more ... well, adorable, or noble, or whatever it takes.
They recently made a video, with strumming guitars, featuring a brand new baby emerging from its egg. The newborn is emerald green, squirmy and so long, it just keeps coming and coming from an impossibly small container. Will this soften the hearts of Lord Howe islanders? I dunno. It's so ... so ... big.
But, hey, why don't you look for yourself?

What happens next? The story is simple: A bunch of black rats almost wiped out a bunch of gigantic bugs on a little island far, far away from most of us. A few dedicated scientists, passionate about biological diversity, risked their lives to keep the bugs going. For the bugs to get their homes and their future back doesn't depend on scientists anymore. They've done their job. Now it's up to the folks on Lord Howe Island.
Will ordinary Janes and Joes, going about their days, agree to spend a little extra effort and money to preserve an animal that isn't what most of us would call beautiful? Its main attraction is that it has lived on the planet for a long time, and we have the power to keep it around. I don't know if it will work, but in the end, that's the walking stick's best argument:
I'm still here. Don't let me go.

Saving the laburnum. RIP Caterpillars

There's a small Cassia fistula growing in our garden, very slowly at that. It is less than six months old. It put out a bunch of new shoots last week. I went to inspect it yesterday, and to my astonishment and dismay, several stems were bare of leaf, chomped away.

 I mistook the caterpillar culprits for those of the common lime, and so gently moved them to the much bigger lime tree. They seemed to settle in well, and were wandering up the tree, and examining out leaves. However, google and the internet revealed that they were Lemon Emigrant caterpillars, which love Cassia! So what was I to do? Four leaf-chomping caterpillars and the little sarakonrai was not likely to survive, I thought.

No other suitable Cassia in the neighbourhood.

I wandered down to the lime tree in the evening. Three of the caterpillars were missing. I found one, curled up on a lime leaf. I moved it back to the sarakonrai hoping against hope that it would survive. It was gone this morning.

I do feel I panicked, and maybe the sapling would have still survived if I had let the caterpillars be? What if I had not examined the sapling yesterday?

Murungai on my mind

These last few days, I have been obsessed with the humble drumstick that I love to use in sambar, stew, avail and anything else - soup even.

I enjoy contentedly chewing on that fibre at the end of a nice rice-laden meal, with my plate exhibiting a neat stack of chewed up murangikai.

I am putting together some educational material on indigenous trees, and the drumstick is on the top of everyone's list it seems.

And its not for the drumstick so much as for the leaves! Click on the link and go below Ranjitha Ashok's article to find Vijayshree Venkatraman's similar mind-blowing discovery!

(I know the excitement is a bit dated, but I was always a bit backward.)

Madras Musings - We care for Madras that is Chennai

A miracle tree in your backyard? (By Vijaysree Venkatraman) As children, many of us hated one vegetable with particular passion and greeted its  appearance on the menu with exaggerated distaste. I reserved this treatment for the slender drumstick. The sight of the chewed-out sheath piling up by people’s plates, when they are done with the pulp within, grosses me out to this day. Some cooks use a fistful of drumstick leaves to flavour the lentil-rich adai. Others capture the characteristic aroma of these sprigs in clarified butter – a delicacy I haven’t thought about in a long time now. But at an international conference in Boston, which I call home now, a Red Cross volunteer spoke of a “miracle tree”, which could be a possible solution to malnutrition in poor, tropical countries. Ounce for ounce, this tree’s leaves contain more beta-carotene than carrots, more calcium than milk, more iron than spinach, more Vitamin C than oranges, and more potassium than bananas, the slide read. The protein content is comparable to that of milk and eggs, it further proclaimed. It dawned on me that la moringa, whose virtues the speaker was recounting in French, was none other than our scrawny drumstick tree. The scientific name Moringa oleifera comes from the Sinhalese word for drumstick. A dozen other species native to parts of Asia and Africa belong to this same plant family. “But typically their leaves taste rank or cabbage-like, and some varieties are simply obscure,” an evolutionary biologist tells me. In Mexico, he encountered the moringa once again. Here, the drumstick is an unknown culinary entity, but the fern-like foliage makes the tree an ornamental. “Perhaps it arrived long ago via the Philippines – where the vegetable is popularly known as Mulunggay – when Spanish galleons sailed between Manila and Acapulco,” the researcher surmises. From research literature, I learn a number of facts about this tree, a familiar sight in Chennai. The moringa is drought-resistant and thrives in soils considered unfit for any cultivation. Both the leaves and the pods are edible, which makes it a good food crop. The seeds yield edible oil that can be used as a bio-fuel. The residue of the ground seed can purify turbid water. Typically, gardeners prune the moringa once a year to keep the produce within arm’s reach. Because of its soft wood, timber is the one thing this low-maintenance tree is not good for. There is no zeal, they say, like the zeal of the new convert. I asked my parents to plant amoringa in their compound in Chennai, so that I can have a fresh supply of the greens when I visit them. They responded with an instant ‘no’, saying that it will attract the kambli-poochi.They don’t know the English equivalent of the name, but I guess that it is just a very hungry caterpillar. I was skeptical of this furry creature. Even its name seems made up. Soon, Nancy Gandhi, a long-time resident of the city, also wrote saying that she once had to cut down her a moringa because it became infested with the kambli-poochi. When an American, albeit a naturalised Chennaiite now, mentions the dreaded pest with the funny name, I tend to believe her immediately. Still, I am certain that some veteran gardener would know a nifty solution to this problem. Meanwhile, there was nothing left for me to do except write about the merits of the moringafor an international newspaper headquartered in Boston. In Chennai, my photographer, a middle-aged man, eagerly set out to find me a suitable image. As he roamed the streets on this mission, a helpful auto-driver asked him what he was looking for. The reply, “a pod-ladenmoringa tree,” earned him a smirk and knowing smiles from passers-by. These responses could have had something to do with the local belief that the moringa pod is an aphrodisiac. There is no denying the moringa’s excellent nutritional profile, which is borne out by laboratory analysis, but there has been no clinical study to prove that the plant can combat malnutrition. Perhaps my article will get philanthropic foundations to fund such a study. I could save the world from hunger, I think grandiosely. And if I write about its supposed virility-enhancing qualities, some rhinos might be spared too. New England is no longer puritanical, but sneaking this last bit into the article might be hard. One thing about my current home, however, will never change. The winters will always be brutally cold here. I simply can’t expect the hardy native of the tropics to survive in my Boston backyard. Frankly, I sometimes wonder how I manage this feat myself! Still, there is something I can do. I can write and spread the word about the dietary goodness of a tree whose produce I had done my best to avoid during my Indian childhood.

So, now is there any truth to this kambli poochi belief, that I keep hearing everywhere?
Kavitha Mandana provides first hand evidence.

KAMBLI poochis are a clever lot!

Insects seem to know more about the fabulous treasures that nature holds. Discover the drumstick tree, says Kavitha Mandana

I don’t know if you have ever had close encounters with those, hairy, horrible, creepy caterpillars that we knew as ‘kambli-poochis’ when we were young? During a particular season they would swarm all over my grandmother’s garden in Mysore. And their particular haunt was the drumstick or moringa tree. One day the drumstick tree would look normal, and the next day, its bark would be wrapped in a ‘kambli’ or blanket as thousands of these caterpillars set up home there. I could never eat my grandma’s drumstick sambhar because I always felt it had kambli-poochi fur in it! But I now realise that those creatures were a clever lot. Yes, hidden behind all those bristles is a decent brain. Because they picked the tree with the highest nutritional and medicinal value in the whole garden! How come they know about it and we don’t?

She goes on to extol the virtues of the murangi before concluding that -
All these days, I’ve been eating bananas for brain-food. But if moringa has more potassium than banana, I’m going to switch. I can’t bear to think that those moringa eating kambli-poochis might be brainier than me!

Now, I need to figure out what this kambli poochi is. Is it the Gypsy moth?  No it's not.  Chitra enlightened me that it was the Eupterote mollifier.  This hairy caterpillar can become quite a pest, it appears, completely defoliating the tree in extreme cases.  

Termite pakodas

My Husband and Other Animals — A moveable feast

JANAKI LENIN

Harvesting Termites When pests become snacks Photo: Rom Whitaker

Before I met Rom, everyone I knew thought termites were pests. When the rains first arrive, clouds of these winged creatures begin to swarm. They buzz around lights and eventually commit suicide in our beverages and dinners. The rest of the year, diligent workers find devious ways of attacking wood furniture. Friends who cry “Herbal mozzie repellent only please” nuke termites with awful chemicals without a second thought.

When Rom and I moved to our farm, I realised that a termite swarm is a major natural-history event. Termites are a rich source of protein that every creature regards as a feast. As the insects soared on their conjugal flights, watchful drongos made acrobatic sorties snapping them up.

Once termites find mates, they lose their wings and burrow underground to nest. Lacking superior aerial skills, shikras perched ungainly on the ground, pecking at these wingless ones. The birds’ prime prey, garden lizards also engorged themselves. They scurried noisily through the dry leaf litter aware that for the moment, their nemesis preferred the fat succulent bodies of these insects to their own scaly, tough ones. Nearby, a flock of white-capped babblers competed with magpie-robins and bulbuls in chasing termites through the grass.

Toads sat like statues, only their tongues flicking in and out mechanically. These were especially greedy little buggers, stuffing themselves more and more when they couldn’t even waddle out of the way. Scorpions rammed so many insects down their throats that the wings stuck out of their mouths, looking like feathered chimeras.

Perhaps this was the only occasion when nocturnal and diurnal creatures, predators and prey dined together. We once found a monitor lizard lying draped over a termite mound, sated, incapable of movement. Even palm squirrels, which I thought were vegetarians, joined in. The normally alert mongooses were so focused on stuffing themselves that they didn’t notice our presence.

Our two young emus were nowhere near as proficient as the others in finding termites. With their large round eyes affixed on an insect in flight, they chased it round and round in comical circles, only occasionally snatching one from midair. Later when the sun rose higher in the sky and the swarming died out, life returned to normal.

The arrival of rains is the cue for the insects to take off on their nuptial flights. But the Irula tribals are wizards in exploiting this resource even without a shower. Many years ago, on a moonless night, I watched them tie a sari around a mound to simulate the stillness before rain. A tin can was buried in the ground. An oil lamp, the only source of light, was balanced on cross-sticks on top of the can. They blew the powder of a local seed called ‘eessal kottai’ (‘termite nut’), which smelt of rain, over the mound. They chanted with a lot of sibilance, like the whispering wings of termites.

Initially nothing happened and I thought this was all hocus-pocus. Then the termites started emerging. They were unable to fly; perhaps their wings were not fully formed yet. They headed for the light and fell into the can. Soon, hundreds of thousands of them came pouring out like a black river. The Irula emptied the can into a gunny sack every few minutes and within an hour, the sack was half full.

Back at the Irula hamlet, we gathered around the fire as they roasted the insects on an iron griddle with rice, turmeric and chilli powders and salt. The fat from the termites sizzled and made the rice grains pop. When I gingerly sampled a roasted termite, I could barely taste it.

I followed the Irula example and shoved a whole handful into my mouth. And then another. Was it insects I was eating? They tasted of fried nuts with a buttery texture but the flavor was unique. Like those toads, I couldn’t stop stuffing myself. With a knowing grin, one of the Irula asked me how the midnight snack tasted.

I answered in Tamil, “Super.”

Printable version | Feb 18, 2012 1:05:11 PM | http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/metroplus/article2903369.ece

© The Hindu

Pongal at Point Calimere - Butterflies at Udayamarthandapuram

(Sheila's picture)

Uttara writes about UMP - 

An irrigation tank fed by water from the Mettur dam, the Udayamarthandapuram Bird Sanctuary was the bird and butterfly lovers’ paradise providing a nice quiet environment except for the noise made by the birds. 

The place was basically like a water body surrounded by vegetation with a path that went all the way around and was more than 3 km long. At times the trees on either side of the path grew tall and met, forming a canopy to create an arch-like effect. 

Also taken by Sheila

At times the path was open to the sky. The place was full of pond herons, grey herons, night herons, purple moorhens, and we also saw pheasant tailed jaçanas, black-headed munias, white ibises and darters. There was also an osprey perched on a pole in the middle of the water body. 

An eagle was also seen though there was some debate on its species. 


Many of us did not even walk the entire perimeter of the sanctuary but even then, a lot of time had already been spent there. It was time to get back because the vehicle had to be sent to pick up Vijay uncle who was to join us then. When we returned to the guest house, the time was 2:45 pm. It was also time for a late lunch at our favourite mess. 

Butterflies!

Can you spot the Common Grass Yellow?
Eurema hecabe.  Maybe this is the
post-monsoon
paler morph?  Caterpillar here.

Me:  I will always remember UMP for the butterflies and the dragonflies.  I went crazy with these winged beauties here, and forgot all about the birds.  It was even greater fun trying to photograph them.  We would slink up on them sloooowly, and just as we got our Panasonic to focus, they would flit away, and then perch a couple of feet away, and the whole process would start again!


India is one of the butterfly hotspots in the world, with around 300 species endemic to us.  I thought this was amazing.  I didnt know this.

Tawny Coster - Acraea terpiscore - common
in Madras too, and I think endemic to India.  Birds find them
unpalatable, and this is how the caterpillar looks.

Common castor - Ariadne merione.  They feed
on castor, are found all over the country

I wonder if this is also common castor or
angled castor?  The wings never rested flat for this butterfly.

A Common Leopard (Phalanta phalantha), basks in the sun.
They love the sun, and love lantanas as well!  

A pair of Common Ceruleans (Jamides celeno)
were in the shade.  These are endemic to India, and
in the dry season, they look a lighter colour
(almost white), as compared to this.

A Common Wanderer - that we found wandering!
If you would like to see how beautiful it looks when the wings are open,
click here.

Lemon pansy - Junonia lemonias.
The caterpillar is quite spectacular!
Its an easier butterfly to photograph.
Basks nicely and cooperatively!

Actually, even the undergrowth near the saltpans had some pretty butterflies.  I could not "capture" that Painted Jezebel that kept flitting about.  And the Crimson Roses in the Kodiakarai grasslands would not still, but made such a beautiful sight, as their red and black went like a blur among the blue meadow flowers.  These beauties below from around the salt pans.

And here is the White Orange Tip.
Ixias marianne, which I first saw in Bharatpur.

A male Danaid Eggfly.  Hypolimnas misippus
The female loves fancy dress.

Dragonflies


These are easier models, they know how to sit still!  The trick is in spotting them, which quite often I don't.

The Ruddy Marsh skimmer - male.

 

Green Marsh Hawk (I think).
Spectacular!
Supposedly pretty common, but my first sighting.

Winged visitors

An injured semi looper moth -Trigonodes hyppasia  

Lemon pansy butterfly

Tailless Blue

Is this a Egnasia ephyrodalis moth?  

They fly in at dusk
And die at night.
Our home,
their final resting place.

Blue pansy butterfly

The same blue pansy, close to death

Deepavali at Rishi Valley - Eight legs & six legs

I always thought the spider was an insect. (Really, what did they teach her in school, you say?) Well, what did you think, huh...huh..go on tell me.

Its quite simple really, spiders have eight legs, insects have six. So spider not insect, ta-da!

So the spider is an arachnid. And guess what, so are scorpions and ticks, arachnids I mean.

And if you are wondering how this great insight dawned on me, it was because of our recent trip to Rishi Valley, some pictures I took of this gigantic "yettu kaal puchi", and then coming back and finding no mention of it in the book called Satpada, Our World of Insects!! I mean, its there in the title staring and screaming at me - SIX LEGS - and I still dont get it. (I can imagine Pranav, the wonder-insect-kid of MNS shaking his head in despair.)

Arachnid aesthetics first

These huge webs are those of the Giant wood spider, and I saw them for the first time in the Rishi Valley campus, and immediately the next day, up on Horsley Hills.

Oh yes look closely, there's the spider to the left and all those white lines...that's how big the web was!

The spider herself. The male is really tiny. Oh, to be a female spider!!

Trying my best to get the spider and the web together

Attempts at art photography. This web survived a really heavy downpour. You can see the water droplets glistening on the web

And this below is what we saw all over the grass, little dew patches I thought, but no, its a spider's web that has caught the morning dew. Check out the tunnel in the middle. its made by an arachnid called a tunnel spider, commonly, a type of wolf spider. I never did see this spider, but I believe its sitting there waiting in that tunnel/funnel, and will emerge as soon as its web vibrates!

If you click on the picture, you will see the funnel in the middle of the sheet-like web.

Insecta next

Lepidoptera - butterflies & moths

I saw -

Tawny costers

Blue Mormon - I wish could have photographed it

Common Mormon

Grass yellows

Plain tiger

White orange tip

And a Common Cerulean

Common Bush Brown

Hymenoptera - bees

The hard working honey bees, were hard at work making honey. I try to reduce the amount of honey I eat or buy these days, (its not making any difference to my waistline), they have a tough enough life it seems, without us eating up all their honey.

Apis dorsata at work

Heteroptera - bugs

Bugs feed on liquid mainly - so they suck, not chew, are quite a nuisance, and also smell foul!

We saw jewel bugs, water skaters, water scorpions and giant water bugs too. The water scorpions and giant water bugs we saw in the stagnant pools of water just off the RV campus, up in the rocks. The water scorpion is quite tiny, maybe an inch long, and I would have missed it, if Thyagu and Murugavel had not lifted it up on a stick and pointed it out. The "tail-like" appendage is actually a breathing tube, I discovered from the Satpada book!

Jewel bug - a shield-back bug, so attractive to look at, but pretty destructive to the plant, sucking out their sap.

Water skaters we saw in plenty at Madhinaiyanicheruvu, the freshwater body, about 20kms from RV.

Odonata - dragon and damselflies

There were so many, but they rarely sat still for me to take a good look, let alone photograph them. Dragonflies are my latest wonder-of-the-natural-world type creature. The glider is the insect with the longest migration....from India to Africa and back, if you please! 14,0000 kms in all.

A Ground Skimmer. Skimmers are found close to the ground and rarely fly more than 1m up. I saw several of these just hovering over the ground.

A Ditch jewel. Seen mainly near sewage ponds, so was this one lost?!

Orthoptera - grasshopper

Just click on the picture below, to appreciate all the colours and markings of the innocuous grasshopper. Take a look at those long legs, ready to put in a loooong jump!

Quite the agricultural pest these insects.

Cataloipus cymbifera is what I thought. But Pranav believes that "it is one of the Migratory Bird Locusts- most probably Schistocerca gregaria, a species that is very well known for its infamous gregariousness (as the name suggests). This is a grasshopper that trims foliage a little too enthusiastically, in the company of hundreds of individuals of its kind".

I made the mistake of asking him why he thought so and he gave me details about the size of the head, and markings on the pronotum, which all was too much for my middle-aged brain to process!! So, i shall just take his word for it. Thanks Pranav!

Coleoptera - beetles

Here's one longhorn beetle that Murugavel found, and placed lovingly on the tree to be photographed.

Longhorn beetle, with their extra long antennae

Hymenoptera - wasps

This looks like a mud dauber wasp of some sort...but all the references I came across show them with yellow legs....so what is this?

It was busy burrowing in the sand just outside the guest house, as the rain started. These wasps paralyse or tranquilise their victims, and then carry them off to their nest, where they are stored for their young ones!

Wasp

I also saw stick insects and mantises, paper wasps and I think even a hornets nest....but I do not have photographs of these.

All in all, a significant improvement in my knowledge of the insect world, in three days, dont you think?

The rains, trees and insects

Seen at GNP -

Pranav of MNS helped me id this!

Hi Ambika,
This is a short horned grasshopper (Acrididae) in the subfamily Oxyinae- most probably Oxya hyla hyla. I don't think there is a common name beyond "Short horned grasshopper"(which refers to thousands and thousands of other species), so these two will just have to be satisfied with the binomial name mentioned above.
Yes, they are a mating pair- the males are always smaller than the females. There is another subspecies- O. hyla intricata , which looks similar, with a deep brown shade above, instead of green. The two subspecies have been noticed mating with each other, but these two specimens seem to have stuck to their own kind... grasshoppers are strict vegetarians. In fact, they are despised for this very fact- the grasshopper in your photo is an infamous pest of rice...
Pranav

Rains!

Skyblue clustervine
August rains, unusual but welcome. It was a wet weekend in Hyderabad and a wetter week that followed in Madras. The papers are full of gripes - bad roads, potholes, overflowing drains, Stadia roofs leaking....Man's woes.

But I look around and I see that every other non-human creature around me is celebrating! The dust and pollution has been washed off the leaves, the cactii greeted the rain with more flowers, I heard the croaking of frogs after aeons, and the morning skies were oh so blue.

So here's my photo offering to that wonderful season of monsoon.

There was torrential rain one night, accompanied by all the sound and light effects that go with a thundershower.

I woke up in the morning to the call of sunbirds, koels and mynahs. This was in Shameerpet, near Hyderabad at a place called Celebrity Resorts.

I also awoke later than I would've liked, thanks to hysterical friends who insisted on hearing strange knockings and feeling imaginary rats crawling up their sheets, in the night!

All were much relieved to see daylight, reassured that all was well with the world, and the sun streaming through the trees was most welcome.

This butterfly (that I thought was a Common Crow) in the rain tree was blissfully unaware of all this nightly drama, as it went about its butterfly day briskly and flightily. As Amila pointed out, its actually a Great Eggfly! Take a look at both the links and this picture and you'll see that there are differences in the way the dots are aligned on the wing tips! Thank you Amila!

A female garden lizard basked in the grass, and obligingly held her pose for me. Some metres away, grown men were yelling like boys as they played a tennis ball cricket match as if their life depended on it.

As I explored the rear garden of our cottage, I saw these wasps hard at work. Are those white dots in the middle of the hexagons their eggs, I wondered.

The rains, I assumed, had led to hatching of hordes of these millipede-like arthopods all over the campus.

They just lay there in clumps, crawling all over each other and moving collectively across the fields. Hundred had been squished under car tyres, and it was not a very pleasant sight I tell you.

I have never seen them in clumps like this, and I wondered what they were. Anyone knows?

The bird life at the resort was amazing. The grounds are vast and wild, and I only hope it remains that way - wild I mean. It would be a pity if the grounds are landscaped.

Not wanting to miss out on the company of friends, and unable to convince them to walk with me in the middday sun, I went for an hour's meander, and did regret not having more time.

There were doves, scaly-breasted munias, mynahs, jungle babblers, bee eaters and sunbirds by the dozens. Red-vented bulbuls called out from everywhere, and I heard coucals and even peacocks!

Strangely, I did not hear a single barbet nor did I hear tree pies. I heard orioles and I caught a flash of scarlet - could it have been a minivet?
Scaly-breasted munias

They were all over the resort, and a first-time for me! I love the stout bills of the munias.
They were a gregarious lot, and I saw flocks like this on trees and in the tall grass. My most memorable moment was coming upon a group of them having a bath in the rain puddle. I delighted in their pleasure, as they whirred around and flew up and down from the nearby shrubs, the whirr of their wings so loud in the quietness.

This one looked busy picking at all the seeds in the grass heads. Everytime a munia landed on a grass, it would bend over with the weight, but they hung on...yoyoing up and down!

So entranced was I with the munias that I almost missed this purple sunbird that came and perched right over my head!

Back in Madras, and the rains continued. A wet Kingfisher sat on the Millingtonia outside my window, waiting for its wings to dry.

The rains also brought a large number of damselflies to my balcony. Strange, delicate creatures and I watched them flit from plant to plant, with their slender bodies bending, almost to form a circle.

I thought this one is a Golden dartlet. Amila says (see comment below) that its probably an Agriocnemis. Hmmm.

I used the Macro setting in my Panasoic Lumix digicam. Not bad, huh?


As I watched the dartlet, I was startled by this grasshoppper that whirred in front of my face, and landed on the leaf ahead. We eyeballed each other for a while, before it took off again for the next plant.




A crow called excitedly overhead, and I wondered if this grasshoppper was going to be lunch. It didn't. It came indoors that evening, and explored our apartment at leisure. It has a strange mannerism of using the foreleg to clean its antenna, and I must say it was more entertaining to watch than the cricket on the telly.

(By the way, I am sick of the over commercialism, greed and ridiculous marketing that is happening through the cricket telecast...impossible to watch.)

Tigers & butterflies

Arun was in Tadoba, for a weekend trip, along with his camera.

He writes:, "The forest was unbelieveably brilliant green , with the rain everyday . The rivers and streams were a raging torrent and a number of 'roads'/paths were underwater. Very often we would have to turn back and look for another place to cross. Sometimes the passage would be one-way(the water level having risen by the time we returned). Birdwatching was limited , notable being Monarch flycatcher sitting in its nest in full view at a height of about 15 feet. And a number of Streak-throated swallows."

I enjoyed being there, via these lovely pictures. Enjoy!

Arun's TADOBA recce - mid monsoon 2010