February Rambles

Millingtonia bare

February-March

Birds perch

I stare.

Grand teak in seed

February-March

Leaves all mulch

earthworm feed.

Green replacing orange-gold

February-March

Tiered branch

Almonds in its fold.

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.

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

Parambikulam, here we come

Off we go, with the usual chaos of waitlisted tickets.


View Larger Map

Map of Parambikulam Willife Sanctuary

Here's what the Official Website of the Parambikulam Wildlife Sanctuary has to say:

Tucked away in the valley between the Anamalai ranges of Tamil Nadu and the Nelliampathy ranges of Kerala on the majestic Western Ghats is the Parambikulam Wildlife Sanctuary.This virgin valley that is the pride of Palakkad district is a glorious tribute to untouched nature.The reservoir harbours several varieties of aquatic fauna including mugger crocodiles that are often seen sunning on its banks.

Parambikulam Wildlife Sanctuary is the most protected ecological piece of Anamalai sub unit of Western Ghats, surrounded on all sides by protected areas and sanctuaries of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the sanctuary is endowed with a peninsular flora and fauna which are excellently conserved due to total protection and minimal human interferences. The sanctuary being a major ecological continuum from Peechhi to Eravikulam through Anamalai aids the large viable populations of wildlife. It is the home ground for different races of indigenous people who are as well an integral part of the prevailing harmonious ecosystem. The thick, opulent habitat of the sanctuary with ample water supplys make it an abode for wildlife and there by for tourist who can have treasured memories of animal sightings and that of being in the lap of mother nature

Western Ghats is one of the world’s 34 bio diversity hotspots. While considering the abundance of Wildlife and the adorable beauty of Nature, Parambikulam Wildlife Sanctuary is perhaps the most attractive piece of wilderness in the entire stretch of Western Ghats. Thus it is popularly revered as ‘Nature’s own abode’. It has a total area of 285 Sq. Kms.

I am looking forward to catching a glimpse of the broad-billed roller, hornbills and please oh please a frogmouth. The sanctuary is also home to the Tarantula spider, which doesn't live in a web, but in a burrow in the sand or in trees. I hope Pranav our insect wonderkid helps us spot one.

There are also 34 species of butterflies classified as "rare and endemic".

Lets hope the Pongal weekend works well!

Satish "Batagur" Bhaskar

Every now and then, the Blackbuck e-group of MNS throws up a wonderful link, story and/or discussion. About a fortnight ago, Santharam posted this link about a personality, which I read with fascination and increasing astonishment. If you do read it, you will share my feelings as well!

Indian Ocean Turtle Newsletter

Satish "Batagur" Bhaskar

Rom Whitaker (as narrated to Janaki Lenin)
Email: kingcobra@gmail.com, janaki@gmail.com

In the early '70s the Madras Snake Park became a local hangout for young folks from nearby campuses like Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), AC College of Architecture and Madras Christian College. Thirty years later I run into some of these guys, sometimes in strange places. They're now mostly as paunchy and balding as I am and we trade a few stories and get into laughing fits over "the good old days".

One of the characters who showed up back then was a soft-spoken engineering student named Satish Bhaskar. He was a teetotaling non-smoker, a real ascetic compared to the rest of us. His passion was the sea, and he spent more time swimming than in the IIT classroom. It's not for nothing that his hostel mates called him Aquaman (privately)!

I was concentrating on crocs at the time, and whenever I could get away from Snake Park it was to survey gharial, mugger and saltwater crocodile habitat across India. At the same time, we also wanted to know sea turtle status: which species come to Indian shores, where, when and in what numbers. So, we really needed a full time sea turtle man.

Opportunely (for the turtles), Satish was getting disenchanted with his IIT course (after finishing most of it) and yearned to be a field man with a mission. The Snake Park had a tiny research budget, but it was enough to hire Satish as Field Officer (Rs. 250 a month, approx. US$ 28 based on exchange rates of that time) and get him out on his first few survey trips. When the fledgling WWF-India saw the good work he was doing for endangered sea turtles, Satish landed his first grant which really set him in motion.

About this time, the Madras Crocodile Bank was being born and Satish was its first resident. He helped to build the place (in between the sea turtle trips) but funds were so tight and sporadic that there were times when he had no work. So what did he do? He kept in shape by filling a bag of sand, carrying it to the other end of the Croc Bank, dumping it and starting again! Villagers still remember Satish hoisting a 50 kg sack of cement over his shoulder casually as if it were no more than a sleeping bag. This was the training that made him so tough in the field; it enabled him to walk most of India's entire coastline, more than 4,000 km, over the next few years looking for sea turtles, their tracks and nests! He loved going to remote places which few Indians have the stamina or stomach for. "To him, swimming in shark infested waters was the most normal thing to do," declares Shekar Dattatri, who has known him since the early Snake Park days.

Old Jungle Saying: Satish is incredibly kind to people. If he has anything that someone wants, he gives it away.

In 1977, Satish conducted the first surveys in Lakshadweep and zeroed in on an uninhabited island, Suheli Valiyakara, as the place for a focused green sea turtle study. The only problem was that the main nesting period is during the monsoon and no one goes there when the sea is so rough. In 1982, Satish left his young wife and three month old daughter, Nyla to maroon himself on Suheli for the whole monsoon, from May to September. It meant making elaborate preparations, like calculating the amount of food he would need. We sat with Satish and talked about things that could go wrong during this isolation - chronic toothache, appendicitis, malaria were just a few sobering thoughts. The Coast Guard provided some signal flares and there was talk of a two-way radio but eventually Satish just set sail and that's the last we heard of him till September.

Actually that's not true. A few months later, his wife Brenda back in Madras, received a loving letter from him. He had launched his message in a bottle on July 3rd and 24 days and more than 800 km later it was picked up by a Sri Lankan fisherman, Anthony Damacious, who very kindly posted it to Brenda along with a covering letter, a family picture and an invitation to visit him in Sri Lanka. The 'bottle post' was very romantic, but of course Satish's spin was that he was trying to see if he could study ocean currents using this technique!

An emergency situation did arise on the deserted isle, and one that none of us could have predicted: a huge dead whale shark washed up on Satish's little island and started rotting. The nauseous stench became so overpowering that our intrepid sea turtle man had to move to the extreme other end of the tiny island to a somewhat precarious, wave lashed spit of sand.

That year the monsoon abated late. So though Satish was packed and ready to go home by September 1st, (after 3 ½ months with only turtles and a radio for company), the relief boat from Kavaratti Island, over 60 km away did not arrive. Satish had run out of rations and legend has it that he survived on milk powder, turtle eggs, clams and coconuts for weeks. Fortunately, the lighthouse on neighbouring Suheli Cheriyakara needed servicing and a Lighthouse Department ship, the MV Sagardeep, arrived on October 11th. As Satish clambered aboard, Capt. Kulsreshta's first words were, "Take him to the galley!"

For a person with a gargantuan appetite, Satish could live on very little. On a trip to the Nicobars, Indraneil Das and he ran out of rations and water and they still had a day's walk ahead of them. The former was half-dead when they ran into a party of Nicobarese who tried to feed them but Satish politely and firmly declined saying they had just eaten and didn't allow Neil to eat either. Later he pointed out that they had nothing to repay the poor people's kindness! (This trip yielded five new species - two frogs, two lizards and a snake.)

On another occasion, on Little Andaman, Satish had again run out of rations and was surviving on "only biscuits and vitamins for 4 days." He came upon an empty Onge tribal camp with some freshly barbecued turtle meat. He took some of the meat and left two biscuit packets in exchange mainly to avoid a spear through his back! Just counting the number of times he ran out of food in remote areas, we suspect that he deliberately starved himself to see how far he could take it.


Photo: The village of Kondul, Great Nicobar (2001). Satish first visited the Great Nicobar island in 1979, and then subsequently in 1981, 1992 and 1994.
Photo courtesy: Kartik Shanker

Old Jungle Saying: Satish always travels with a kerosene stove and a pressure cooker. The former is to avoid burning wood as it is bad for the environment and the latter for cooking efficiency. He also carries an automobile inner tube to raft his supplies from canoe to shore and vice versa.

Through the 1980s, again thanks to WWF and other funds, Satish visited many of the islands of the Andamans. His were the first recommendations on sea turtle nesting beach protection. These helped give the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Forest Department a solid conservation basis to resist the efforts of big business and other Government Department interests in "developing" beaches for tourism.

Amongst all this serious work, he had time for research of another kind. Writing in Hamadryad, the Croc Bank Newsletter, he wonders if the sea krait was attracted to light, feigns dismay that this may be true and proceeds to try to make one climb his leg by playing with his torchlight!

By this time, Satish's work was being appreciated by sea turtle biologists worldwide. Papers on the species inhabiting this region were very scarce indeed and his publications helped to fill that big gap. In 1979 Satish was invited to give a paper on the status of sea turtles of the eastern Indian Ocean at the World Conference on Sea Turtle Conservation, in Washington D.C. In recognition for his contributions to sea turtle conservation, Satish received a fancy watch and award from Rolex in 1984.

When Ed Moll came to India to do a freshwater turtle study, Satish became a key collaborator. He surveyed extensively for a highly endangered Batagur baska which nests on coastal beaches along with olive ridleys. Sadly the Bengalis have eaten the terrapin to near extinction and there are no known wild nests in India. It was at this time that he was nicknamed "Batagur Bhaskar".

Old Jungle Saying: Satish has no sense of direction. He gets lost easily.

He spent many months, over several years, studying the hawksbill and green turtle nesting biology on tiny South Reef Island on the west coast of North Andaman. He described this island as "one of ten sites most favoured by nesting [g]reen turtles in India". Saw Bonny, a Forest Department Range Officer stationed on Interview Island, regularly risked his life ferrying supplies to Satish on South Reef Island, even during stormy monsoon weather. Bonny deputed a department staff member from his camp to assist Satish who was working alone. Emoye spent a few days on South Reef, got fed up and wanted to return. Since the currents were strong and Satish was an accomplished swimmer, Emoye requested him to go along with him.

Over the years shark fishermen regularly hauled in sharks from this very channel. The sea was rough, it was after all the monsoon season. Being a modest and understated narrator, Satish rated his swimming skills as "below par" and claimed that his snorkeling flippers gave him confidence. To keep warm during the more than two kilometre swim, he wore two shirts. Emoye rested frequently on Satish to catch his breath and together the two of them swam across the channel.

A party of shark fishermen were camped on the beach in Interview when our intrepid swimmers landed. One of them remembered meeting Satish earlier and enquired, "Still loafing around? Still jobless?" He thought Satish was an ambergris-hunter. It was already dark when Satish and Emoye set out across the island to the forest camp. Half way, a bull elephant in musth trumpeted his warning from just 30 metres away and started to chase them. The two men ran for their lives. Later Satish would recount, "I had done some distance running in college but the penalty for losing was never as dire." Already exhausted from their long and arduous swim, they couldn't continue running and the elephant showed no signs of relenting. Remembering a Kenneth Anderson story, Satish threw his shirt down while continuing to run and was gratified to hear the pachyderm squealing with rage moments later. With the animal distracted, the men could finally stumble onwards to the forest camp. They made a pact - if the shirt was intact, it was Emoye's; if not, then Satish's. The next morning they found the shirt in three pieces completely smeared with muddy elephant footprints, while one bit had to be recovered from a tree. He later posted the pieces back to Brenda with a reassuring note.

Old Jungle Saying: Satish trusts people implicitly and they, in turn, don't let him down.

In the mid 1980's WWF-Indonesia contracted Satish to study the huge, intensely exploited leatherback sea turtle rookeries on the beaches of the Vogelkopf, the western most peninsula of the island of New Guinea, in Irian Jaya. This was a logistically tough place to work. First of all, there was no access from the landward side and one couldn't even land a boat on the beach. This was why it had remained protected for so long. Then the people from neighbouring areas started taking tens of thousands of leatherback eggs. People swam ashore with jerry cans and sacks and floated the eggs back to boats.

However, Satish found a way to keep in touch. He would swim 100 m out to a passing longboat that was headed to Sorong, and hand his letters to someone on board with enough currency for stamps. There was one boat every 20 to 30 days. By late Aug 1985, he had tagged about 700 leatherbacks almost single-handedly.

Rather uncharacteristically, Satish never wrote up his report for WWF-Indonesia. I have no explanation why this happened nor did we ever discuss this. After a year had passed and there was no sign of the report, I was embarrassed as I had recommended him for the job. The document was sorely needed to put some laws in place very soon. I had my sense of justice as well so I wrote the report in his name.

Sadly, the 13,360 nests that he recorded in 1984 was probably the highest ever in recent years. Ever since then, the average number of nests has hovered way down around 3200. And this has resulted in yet another 'Satish myth' - the local people believe that Satish tagged the female leatherbacks with metal tags, and using a giant magnet drew all the turtles to his country! The local elders have refused to permit any more tagging of turtles on this beach.

Old Jungle Saying: He doesn't like to crawl into a sleeping bag on cold nights; instead he wears all his clothes. Sometimes, he buries himself, except his face which is covered by a mosquito net, in the sand to get away from inquisitive island rats, mosquitoes and sand flies at night. He usually sleeps out of sight of others at camp, after playing a few riffs on his harmonica.

In 1993, while chugging past Flat Island, a small spit of land off the west coast of the Jarawa Tribal Reserve in the Andamans, Satish and his companions saw a pair of human footprints emerging from the sea and disappearing into the vegetation. Satish had evaluated this island as a prime green turtle nesting beach, and despite the others cautioning him of Jarawas (the hostile tribe who routinely finished off trespassers with arrows), Satish swam ashore. His companions watched in horror as he followed the footprints into the forest. While his friends feared the worst, he emerged from another side crouching behind a green turtle carapace, holding it like a shield. The fearsome tribals never showed themselves and Satish returned safely.

On a subsequent trip, some Jarawa came aboard the canoe. Satish later recalled admiringly that the Jarawa were powerful swimmers and he had been very impressed by the bow-wake their breast-stroke created. Everyone else cowered in the back while Satish calmly interacted with the tribals. The crew had already hidden the machetes and other metal objects that the Jarawa coveted for making arrow heads. Eventually the tribals left without harming anybody but did take some spoons.

Old Jungle Saying: Satish likes to catch everything.

Local intelligence was that the Galathea river, Great Nicobar, had a lot of crocodiles. After dark one night standing on the bridge spanning the river, Satish played his torch over the water. Suddenly his flashlight caught some small eye shines along the waters' edge and he got very excited thinking they were baby salt water crocs. So he crept down to the edge of the river to catch them, but they turned out to be large spiders!

But he did have encounters with crocodiles. Once while lying asleep on a beach on Trinkat Island, Nicobars, he woke up to a rustling noise. He found a young croc looking at him through the mosquito net. In mock seriousness he later wrote, "I'm overlooking it this time but if the crocs that wake me get any bigger I'm headed back to Madras."

The Karen of the Andamans are particularly fond of Satish. He earned their respect by treating young and old with courtesy and respect, and also with such exploits as swimming from Wandoor in Middle Andaman to Grub Island (a distance of about 1.6 km) and back, walking the entire coastline of Little Andaman even crossing swift streams such as Bumila and Jackson Creeks and doggedly surveying beaches no matter how big the obstacles. But that didn't stop the Karen from teasingly nicknaming Satish, Cheto (Karen for 'basket', as it rhymes with Bhaskar!). Several older Nicobarese remember "the man who came looking for turtles" even today, many years after his last visit. He was perhaps the only man to ever find a reticulated python on the tiny island of Meroe (between Little Nicobar and Nancowry). The Nicobarese, who frequent the island, had never seen this species there before and were duly impressed. This python was later handed over to the Forest Department in Port Blair.

Satish notched identification marks on the carapaces of turtles that came ashore to lay eggs. Later, a bunch of titanium tags was sent by the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service for tagging hawksbills on South Reef. In Vogelkopf, he tagged more than 700 leatherback turtles. There is no information on tag returns from any of these turtles. One reason may be that subsequent night surveys (after Satish left) were inconsistent on Andamans, Nicobars and Irian Jaya. Secondly, the English lettering which provides the return address means little to local people. Karen tribals have mentioned finding tags on turtles they ate but not knowing the significance of the metal, simply threw it away into the bush.

For not being a religious person at all, he has the morals of one. He doesn't like anyone to tell him what to do, which made my job as boss difficult. (But he was conscientious about sending reports so he didn't need to be reminded.) I clearly remember once when I suggested that he store his things in a tin trunk as they were being destroyed by termites, he took umbrage. "Would I tell you what to do, Rom?" he asked in his low pitched gruff voice with a touch of menace. I never made that mistake again! He is a perfectionist - wanting to do everything right and better than anybody else. He also has an exaggerated sense of justice - always rooting for the downtrodden (probably why he got along well with tribals, villagers and field people). In many ways, he is very un-Indian.

Old Jungle Saying: Nothing is useless; anything "useless" was just something for which you haven't yet found a use.

Once while running to catch a bus to Mayabunder, his chappal broke. On being asked if he'd like to buy a new pair, he responded, "Only one broke - surely another one will wash up with the high tide". He tried very hard to keep South Reef clean of trash. On one occasion, he arrived in Madras with two sacks stuffed with rubber chappals that had washed ashore on the island. Legend has it that he took it to the recyclers.

After twenty years of doing some of the first baseline sea turtle surveys in the country, Satish retired to spend more time with his family. Soon thereafter, an UNDP (United Nations Development Program) - Wildlife Institute of India project did a more extensive survey of turtle nesting beaches. But since then, the 2004 tsunami has changed the profile of many Andaman and Nicobar beaches and we don't yet know where new beaches are forming, or how the turtles have responded to this change. We desperately need a new Satish Bhaskar to continue the work.

Satish now lives in Goa with his wife Brenda (who was by the way, the Snake Park and Croc Bank's secretary for many years!) and their three children (Nyla, Kyle and Sandhya). Satish is the man who kicked sea turtle conservation in India into high gear. There's a strong lesson in all this and an inspiration to young naturalists who wonder, "What can I do to help?" Satish's single-minded quest for sea turtles in his quiet, often unorthodox way, set the stage for the major conservation efforts being made today. Here's a prime example of how one person's passion for an animal and its habitat can help make the difference between survival and extinction.

Inputs from Aaron Savio Lobo, Allen Vaughan, Arjun Sivasundar, Atma Reddy, Manish Chandi, Manjula Tiwari, K. Munnuswamy, Nina and Ram Menon, Shekar Dattatri are gratefully acknowledged.

And the man actually exists. Thyagu remembers that he would casually run from IIT Madras to the beach, go for a swim and then run back to campus!

Two stories

This last month I read two rather different books, each in a very different way dealing with nature and the environment. One was set in Kenya and the other in an imaginary futuristic US. One was joyous and heartwarming and the other bleak and foreboding.

I shall not go into the stories or plots of each, as you can read that on Amazon, instead here's what I thought of each of them.

The Kenya book was borrowed from Chitra, and is called A Guide to the Birds of East Africa. It was a delightful, charming read, with the central character, gentlemanly Mr Malik being challenged to a bird race by the more racy Harry Khan. I think I enjoyed it all the more because of the bird descriptions that I could relate to, the vagaries of a bird race that I have also experienced, and the familiarity with descriptions of Kenya, so similar to colonial India. But above all, it was uplifting to read a book where no one is really bad, if you know what I mean, and people make ethical choices and ambition takes a back seat. Nicholas Drayson is the author. There's this bit where Mr Malik strikes it rich finding so many birds around a sewage pond, and it reminded me of our trips to Pallikaranai, and our wonder at seeing so many birds so close to garbage and polluted waters!

Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood was a completely different reading experience altogether. I picked it up from the library. So bleak, it was like being among the Deatheaters I tell you, peopled by greedy, unscrupulous, fickle characters. And yet, I could not put it down. It's one of those apocalyptic future books, where a group of committed eco groupies are fighting the system, with an alternate way of life. Why is it that every future scenario is imagined with humans at their basest character, with the only advances being made in technology? Dystopic rather than Utopic? There is no change in human thinking at all. Atwood takes our current socio-political structures to its logical extreme end, with gated communities and governments run like corporations and everything artificial - gene splicing, cloning, all kinds of new creatures.

I don't know why, but I am greatly affected when women characters are so badly abused....it just bothers me to read about women so powerless and exploited, as they are in the Atwood book. I found it completely joyless, the book I mean, and even the eco groupies (called God's Gardeners by the way), seem to have no sense of joy or wonder, more a sense of "this is my duty, and this is what I have to do".

I would readily recommend the Drayson book to all, but not the Atwood. Besides the bleakness, the plot itself and its resolution is all too pat and disappointing.

But, it is the Atwood book that had me thinking for days....does it really need us to believe in the cause of the environment like a religion to make a change? Do we need to create new gods and saints, like Adam One does in the book? Why does the Asian psyche not lead to such future-scenario books?

Spreading shade

The Hindu : Life & Style / Society : Spreading shade


Planting, nurturing and protecting trees…Nizhal, an NGO, is committed to transforming Chennai into a green city

Every morning, Vasanthi Rajiv goes for a walk along with her pet dog. And while they fill their lungs with fresh air, Vasanthi also takes time to remove the advertisements nailed on the trees.

A member of Nizhal, Vasanthi says, “This is part of our organisation's ‘ Free the Tree' campaign. I used to pull out the ads on Sundays but they would be back on Mondays. So I decided to make it a daily activity.” And with the aid of a long custom-made claw hammer, she goes about her job.

“As a result, there are no ads on trees in Alwarpet, Mandaveli and R. A. Puram,” laughs Shobha Menon, one of the founder members of Nizhal, an NGO that plants and cares for trees and promotes concern for them in the city. It is about empowering people to speak for trees. Established in 2005, by a group of five tree lovers, the organisation's first activities included planting and surveying trees.

Tree walks

With expert advice from Shekhar Raghavan, Director of Rain Centre, and G. Dattatri, their chief advisor, they then came up with the idea of tree walks where people were taught about trees, their properties, and the abuse of trees in urban areas. “The first walk was organised in Besant Nagar with around 30 participants. Ever since, we have only seen the number growing,” says Shobha. Such is the popularity of this activity that apart from corporates, even parents want to make it part of their child's birthday party!

Shobha feels that most people don't even look at a tree till the roots damage their compound wall. “Trees are our lifeline; should we not do our bit for them? If you see a tree being abused, and can't do much, just inform the Corporation about it,” she says. She nostalgically points to a tree which stands about 7-ft tall and smiles, “I remember it being knee-high. Look at it today. It feels so good to see a tree grow.”

We are in the PWD Tree Park where Nizhal is currently working along with the State Public Works Department to commemorate the park's 150 years. Four acres of barren land that was a dump is now green with grass and 240 trees belonging to 200 different species. Keeping them company are birds, multi-hued butterflies and spotted deer.

The purpose of the park apart from providing a green canopy is to educate children, who may reel out videogame names but may not be able to name more than 6-7 species of trees. The park is expected to be ready in three months' time. According to her, planting saplings has become a fad these days but it is not about the number of trees that are planted but about choosing the right species, planting them properly and ensuring there is enough space for them. One must also take care to see that after they are planted, the trees are tended to and nurtured till they can survive on their own.

Working with prisons

Into its fifth year, Shobha attributes Nizhal's success to its committed core team and volunteer network. Nizhal's other projects include school and college programmes, neighbourhood initiatives, gardening and growing vegetables as occupational therapy for patients in the IMH, and working with prisons across Tamil Nadu. It started with ‘Puzhal and Nizhal,' a campaign that helped green the prison grounds. Prisons in Cuddalore, Pudukottai and Tiruchi, and now the Palayamkottai and Madurai prisons, have been covered by the green brigade.

They are given seeds, panchakavyam and vermicompost. Dr. Dayanandan, an expert, educates them about what to plant and when. At the end of the year-long programme, the prisoners are given a certificate. So, when the vegetables and fruits grow, there is considerable excitement and gleeful shouts of “Takkali, vendakkai valandirukku… ingay avarakka valandirukku!” Says Shobha, “This way, we heal not only the minds of people but also the environment.”

WHAT'S REQUIRED

* Regenerate biodiversity

* Plant local and natural species

* Report / stop abuse of trees

For details, log on to www.nizhaltn.org

Keywords: biodiversity, Nizhal