Madras to Manas - Day 1 of our Assam Adventure

Here we are all locked down and "covided".  Sigh!  Assam in January seems a dream.  Yes I travelled, from Madras to Manas, all in a day, I went from beach and coconut trees to Silk Cotton, grasslands and rhinos.

It was a week of unforgettable sights, memories and new friendships, in an MNS trip that was missing my usual companions - Sekar, Raji, Sheila!

11th January 2020 - Day 1

It had been a hectic first fortnight of January - a Sogetsu Ikebana exhibition at Cholamandal, good friends Mona and Donu visiting from Chicago, and last minute packing.  Packed all the warm clothes I could find at home, and some more, (Vijay's message exhorted us to "layer", pack moisturiser, and be prepared for the cold),  and I had a rather bulky bag. Nervously weighed it, and yay, I was within limits!

345 am - left from home at this ungodly hour. Last minute change of backpack. Packing of battery packs. Off with a resigned Sekar as chauffeur to the airport picking up Pritam and Shubha along the way.

The frisson at the beginning of a trip is wonderful.  Anticipation, meeting up with old and new traveling companions. Greetings all around. My usual "inner circle" of mates and partners in crime were missing - Raji, Sheila (and of course Sekar, my long-suffering husband!), so it was a different feeling.  Much to my chagrin, I realised that I had graduated to the "older group" with the younger crew of the Sudars and Yuvan around. My rooming companion Devika had managed to hurt her toe quite badly, but was her usual unflappable self.  Cousin Kumar and family were in full attendance on this trip.  Venkatesh and Aparna, Suresh, Shantharam, Mr Shankarnarayanan...good mornings all around.  Elu and Kumar had gone ahead to explore Guwahati.

We were spread out across the Indigo flight - I was in 20A - and the flight to Kolkata was for catching up on sleep.

Kolkata to Gwahati - The Captain announces that we should watch out for the Himalayas, and there they were in the distance.

First sights of the Bramhaputra from the air.

Touchdown!  Guwahati airport was clean and neat. (I was rather pleased to see that it was named after a local Gandhian Gopinath Bordoloi.)  We met Pranjal, our accompanying naturalist for the entire trip and Hiranya, who was coordinating from HELP Tourism.  Elu and Kumar were at the airport too.  Our transport had come - Innovas - and we all were welcomed with shawls with lovely Assamese embroidery - I was introduced to the Gamusa - like our ponnadais.  More about it later.

Close to 10 am, and so we set  off. Sudar, Bhuvanya and Yuvan and me in one vehicle, with our driver Ramanan. And I had my first glimpses of the beautiful state of Assam.

Bamboo everywhere

Marvellous non-plastic packaging

Crossing the Bramhaputra, as we travelled north on the New Saraighat bridge - I think that's the old one across.  The parapets were so high, that I could only get occasional peeks of the river we were crossing.

We travelled on NH31 - amazingly good surface, and a divided highway.  

We stopped for breakfast...but where was everyone else?  

I loved the names of the towns - Nalbari, Barpeta, Sarupeta.   Poles filled with doves, beautiful little bamboo groves in homes, bamboo fences, ponds, and green and clean.  It was love at first sight.

Many streams and tributaries crossed

We entered  a  tea garden, 

and then there was the Manas arch, turn left and bump along a dusty road and we had arrived!

Florican cottage was a joy.  What a beautiful location, and run by Manas Ever Welfare Society - MEWS.  The cottage is at the edge of the sanctuary and within a 100m of the Beki tributary of the Manas river.

In true MNS style we kind of just wandered into rooms and settled down without a fuss.  The rooms were simple, clean and had all that we needed - clean loos and hot water.  It was lunch time, and we were all assembled in a trice in the lunch room, which is open on the sides, and in the middle, in-between the rooms.

One of the first discoveries was the lemon at lunch.  Hmm interesting.  It has a thick skin, and is tart, and accompanied every meal for the next seven days.  I quite enjoyed squeezing it on dal, which was also a regular part of meals.

Near the wall, a Powder Puff tree full of sunbirds, doves, bulbuls swooping by and tree sparrows.  The sun was shining as we set off for our first safari at 2pm in the afternoon.

Manas first impressions

What a magical introduction.

Welcomed by peacocks

and jungle fowls.  We would see them every time we entered and exited the park.

Silk Cotton forests!  A first for me, and throughout the trip, a lot of the bird "action" was around these trees.

Yellow-footed Green Pigeons seemed most bored at my excitement.

A Blue-Throated barbet! (Psilopogon asiaticus) What a beauty! My first of many lifers that Manas would reveal.  (Photo by Suresh)

The streaked spiderhunter (Arachnothera magna) (Photo by Suresh)

and the Lineated Barbet (Psilopogon lineatus), that's found only in the Bramhaputra region.  This is similar to the brown-headed and white-cheeked barbet, but the steaks go much further down on the chest, and there's no white "eyebrow", or cheek patch.  (Photo by Suresh)

Find the male Siberian Stonechat.  They were everywhere, we saw them everyday, every ride.  But this was my first sighting.  Soon I would recognise their clicking call, as they flew in the grasslands, searching for insects and well camouflaged.  The males were easier to spot for me.  The females, are a duller colour.

Little streams and ponds dotted our drive

The sun was sinking rapidly over the vast grasslands which stretched as far as my eye could see, it was becoming cooler and we moved towards a watchtower, to take in the view.  

A 360 view. Terai Grasslands.  And so much more!

The evening just got better and better

We climbed up to the watchtower, and I for one could not contain my excitement, awe and wonder.

My first rhino sighting, and it was a mother and baby! What a sight - these mega-herbivores, and shapers landscapes.

The baby was a sensation.  Turns out, it had made the local newspapers, and I was privileged to see it and the mother.

The news item said the mother R3A (couldn't they have given her a nice name as well?) was 6 years old and had become a mother for the first time.  The grandma had been translocated from Pobitora.

Born on Jan 4th - less than 10 days old, when we saw it!  It roamed around on its own, but never more than 10 feet from mom, it seemed.  

Strangely endearing - Small ears, big horn, armour plated, the magical one-tonne unicorns of Assam, 

with a butt like a Mami in madusaar,

that prehensile lip and constant singleminded eating.  Watching the rhino like this, it was easy to forget its strength - I felt like walking across the grass and engaging with it, so peaceful did it look.

There was more magic - a pair of Hen Harriers (Circus cyaneus) (another lifer) flew majestically in unison across the grasslands, and I learnt from Pranjal that the male was the whiter/grey one with black wing tips and the female was the one with the Kite-like colourations.  They went and settled in the grassland, out of sight, and it could have been that they were nesting there?  After a bit, the male was seen in the air again, circling and looking to me as if it was hunting for dinner.

A peacock danced and sedately pirouetted, reminding me so much of the moves of a Kathakali dancer, 

a wild boar snuffling around, as the grass was lit by the descending sun

I could've stayed there all night but it was time to go.

We were not done yet though.

We reached another clearing, another watchtower (Budha Budhi)  and we came across the most number of mixed herbivores I have ever seen together.

There were elephants, gaur, rhino and hog deer and wild boar, all in close proximity.  The light may have been fading, and the pictures were not the best, but what a magnificent sight. Soon, it was just shadows, and grey silhouettes fading into the jungles.

Mr Shankarnarayan captured a beautiful moment, which you can see by clicking here, of a rhino and a Gaur sizing each other up, or was it a friendly greeting?

My heart was full, all was well with the world, and as we watched, the magnificent creatures went back into the tree cover, probably unhappy with the attention they were getting from us.

It was just 5 in the evening, but the sun was setting, and there was an immediate creeping chill in the air.

As we made our way out in the safari jeeps, I thought about all the poaching and the civil strife that drove Manas down a rotten path, now revived and healthy.

It was a short ride back to Florican, and I hurried into thermals and all the warm wear that I brought, plus there was a bonfire to boot.

Cute little puppies who also decided the best place to be was at the bonfire!  It was not late, probably around 6, but it was pitch dark.

We sat around the bonfire, moving around to warm all parts of ourselves, including our freezing butts, and given all the synthetic stuff we were wearing, it would have just needed one spark to cause some damage.  Cheerful chatter, notes exchanged, and my mind wandered in disbelief.  Was I really here, at the foot of the Bhutan hills, some 2,500 kms away from where I was this morning?

Hot dinner, soup, roti dal and that lemon is what I remember, and everyone wanted to hurry indoors and under blankets.  Hot water bottles were in great demand!

It was good to get under the thick rasais, Devika tired and probably in some pain and discomfort had crashed out.  But a ventilator over my head was sending down this freezing draft, so I roused myself from under that rasa and went in search of help in getting that closed.

Aah, that felt better and warm.

More Manas Magic awaited.

Lifers for the day -

The rhino of course
Siberian stonechat
Hen Harriers
Blue-throated barbet
Lineated barbet

Continued here.  

Lockdown diaries - Home to see the 'baby', and a happy Mother's Day

The "mother" Kopsia in my mother's garden 

And I got home to finally see the "baby" in flower.

Strange, inexplicable joy and delight.

And the coppersmith barbets have returned in my absence, tonk-tonking on the neighbour's bare teak tree.  Ever since the Millingtonia fell, they have been absent.

And the koels are calling frantically.  All night long it feels like.

Lockdown Diaries - Changing colours, trading places

White blooms at dusk
Light pink the next day
And flaming red thereafter,

the Rangoon malli always fascinated me, from my childhood.
How could this plant have flowers of so many hues?

Upright buds
Drooping blooms

I admired them this morning

once again

as I sought refuge

in my mother's garden, 

following the tailor bird

that called to me from within.

Combretum indicum, aka Quisqualis indica aka Rangoon creeper aka Rangoon malli

Gastropod sighted

The Great African Snail - moved with intent

Achatina fulica

May Day, May Day, Tabebuias in bloom!

Chennai
Hanami
Lockdown
Flowers drop, softly, on their own
No planes
No tamasha.

The week that was - Lockdown diaries

April 24th to May 1st

A pensive cat on Friday, 

 a moth on my pillow, the night of Saturday

A chirpy bulbul before crossword, last Sunday,

Spied a dragonfly on Monday

Work From Home views everyday!

Glorious sunset colours on Tuesday

Gasp! A plane in the sky - Wednesday

and leaf art on Thursday.

Thus ended April 2020

Encounters aplenty

a month in Lockdown

the time has indeed flown.

Lockdown Dairies - Discovering Coral

23rd April 2020

Over the last few days, I have watched Chasing Coral on Netflix - no, it's not that long, just that I have watched in snatches - with awe, fascination, that changed to consternation and horror and finally ended with a feeling of misery and shame as to what we have done and what a screw up it all is.

The film is about the 2016 destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, and the great bleaching event that year, across the world, in oceans everywhere, putting the entire ocean ecosystem in peril.

In April 2017,  we (MNS) made a memorable trip to the Andaman Islands, and this included a snorkelling morning off Havelock.

Sheila's picture of the beautiful day it was

Seeing the picture brought back memories of that glorious morning, the shared delight of seeing those unknown marine creatures, the joy on my friend Raji's face at this whole new experience of ocean watching, the cool water under the strong April sun

I revisited the underwater pictures that one of the diving crew took and shared with us.

From what I understood from the documentary, this then is dead coral - just back to being like a rock.  Look at those beautiful fishes,

One piece of agrophora(?) coral still holding on

Honeycomb coral (I think) to the left, but on the right, that looks dead to me.  

And is this a bleaching coral?

There had been much tectonic change in the region after the tsunami.  However, as the ANET researchers were telling us, there had also been large-scale bleaching events as recent as 2016.

I read on their page that they now have a Citizen Science project REEF LOG.  Indian waters and corals suffer from poor levels of documentation and research so this is a welcome effort.

Vardhan Patankar and a whole host of young scientists are also studying reef resilience in the Andaman waters - why some reefs seem more able to recover from bleaching events than others.

This may lead to better predictive models.  "Coral stress is caused by an increase in sea surface water temperatures that remain above a specific threshold for three months. The threshold is usually one degree celsius above the highest summertime mean sea surface temperature for three months, or above four ‘degree heating weeks’ (DHWs), as this metric is called."

In the meantime, this year, there seems to have been another mass bleaching event this year on the GBR.

This is likely the last generation to see the Great Barrier Reef as humans have known it

Michael J. CorenApril 8, 2020

For 500,000 years, the Great Barrier Reef has grown steadily in the cool, clear waters off Australia. But after surviving five glacial periods, the reef’s billions of inhabitants may not survive humanity.
On March 26, the Reef endured its third major bleaching event in five years. Many of its corals sustained massive bleaching, even in the southern portion relatively untouched during the previous events, according to the Australian government. A rapidly warming climate has sent wave after wave of hot waters washing over the 3,000 individual coral reefs that make up the massive living structure, which stretches over 2,300 km (1,429 miles).
When water temperatures rise just a few degrees above normal, stressed corals may eject their symbiotic algae, leading to bleaching events. The bone-white corals are left without their life-giving partners. Some recover. But if bleaching occurs too often, and too intensely, the reefs die along with their ecosystem, often compared to a rainforest.
Sea surface temperatures, already 0.4 degrees Celsius higher than historical averages, are set to hit 2.5 degrees Celsius above normal by the end of the century. “Climate change remains the single greatest challenge to the Reef,” states Australia’s marine park agency.
Andrea Dutton, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has spent her life studying this phenomenon. She drills into fossilized corals to see what they can tell us about the last few hundred thousand years of sea levels and ice sheets during bouts of global warming.
She spoke with Quartz twice over the past year to detail what today’s corals portend about the climate, and the significance of bleaching on the world’s largest coral system. Change, she knows, is part of life on the reef. But the pace now dwarfs anything that has come before. “It’s not that life can’t adapt,” she says. “But the question really is, can we still support human civilization, in a sustainable way on this planet. To do this, we need a healthy ecosystem around us…Not having healthy oceans is a profound risk to human civilization.”

Can you describe exactly what’s happening?
When the ocean heats up, symbiotic algae, the zooxanthellae [a yellowish-brown symbiotic dinoflagellate that lives in the coral and gives it color], can’t stay there anymore. And so they leave. And what’s left behind is just the coral skeleton, which is white. If you were to look at it from above, it completely changes the reef. All the color would be gone. The things that rely on coral to feed them also start to struggle.
And that’s what the corals look like in the fossil record. They’re just these white carbonate skeletons that I work with to try to understand what happened in the past.
If you had to analogize what’s happening to the reefs as if they were a human city, how would you describe that?
When a hurricane comes through and wipes out everything you need to live, it’s left in ruins. Things start to grow over it. You can’t imagine life being there anymore. That’s what’s happening to coral reefs, which are home to so many different organisms in the oceans.
When those corals don’t survive, they get covered with algae. This really slimy green yucky stuff. I’ve been diving on reefs that are covered with algae. It smells with all the dead organisms on the reef after the bleaching event. It was so upsetting I had to get out of the water. I couldn’t stay in it. It was absolutely horrifying to experience in person when you see what’s happening.
The problem is if you want to rebuild the reef, it’s not like rebuilding a city. If you had a whole bunch of money, you could go in there and build new buildings, and people could move in right away. For reefs, you could try to put in little recruits, little tiny coral colonies in there, and it would be so difficult to repopulate the entire reef. We would have lost species. A lot of those coral recruits wouldn’t survive anyway. 

It’s not like we can just flip a switch and rebuild in the way that you can rebuild a city.

Will the Lockdown help keep the ocean temperatures down this summer?

PS:  The film has a shot of the Madras Marina beach (with a crow, scores of people and the lighthouse to boot), at bout he 65th minute.

Lockdown diaries - Adyar evenings

April 22nd 2020

In the evenings, pelicans come to the estuary, and its entertaining to watch them fish.  Today they fished along with the fishermen, and the sun lit them up so nicely.  This is an iphone picture, through the binoculars.

On the western side, the sun shone on the blooming Copper Pod, yellow on yellow.  The picture couldn't capture the "on-fire" effect.

 

I liked the way the evening sun lit up the panorama.

And another day ends.

My naturalist friends are busy looking at the night skies.  The Meteor showers show.

Lockdown diaries - Crow Chronicles

19th April 2020

And so the lockdown will continue we are told.  Stay home and stay safe.  It happens to be a Sunday today.  As a wit on WhatsApp observed, why bother with days, its either this day or that day or like every other day!  Sundays are different - I get a fresh crossword to do and see the answer for that annoying one about the Cockney bruiser  from last week.

More morning walks.

Past the crow bath I go.  They all line up, one row at the bath and the next row waiting for their turn.  There's a fizz and cheer in them, as they have a good splash before they fly off to the Tabebuia nearby to dry themselves.  

In good Indian fashion, these crows bathe before breakfast - sustenance provided by a Good Samaritan in the building.  Every morning as I walk round and round, I ponder the question to feed or not to feed.  And arrive at no answer.  I used to be anti-feeding....in the current situation, I don't know anymore.

A crow hops on the path in front of me, reluctant to waste energy in flight until there seems no other go.  Oh these pesky humans!

Anyways now that we pesky humans are all at home, everyone else is out celebrating it seems!

Chennai Skies so blue 

Flamingoes in Mumbai, Starlings murmuring somewhere else, starry nights and even the Pallikaranai marsh is teeming!

Downsizing life

R Bhanumathi, Naturalist

For Bhanumathi, the lockdown has been a chance to think about her lifestyle choices: a reminder to live a sustainable life. “We need to examine how much resources we are using,” she says. Whether it is using ingredients judiciously in the kitchen, buying fewer gadgets and cars, or “on a more personal level, even whether we need to have two or more children. I am glad many are making the conscious decision to adopt instead. Because we have to think about the kind of planet we are leaving for them, 30 years down the line.” 

Given that things are no longer easily available to us at our doorstep, she says this has made her pay attention to the whole process of manufacturing that goes behind a finished product and all the people involved in it. 

The lockdown is a huge shift from her regular life, given she would go on Nature expeditions almost twice every month. “This period has taught me tolerance and patience in thinking before making decisions.” The odd dragonfly still wanders inside her window. “One day, I heard the calls of a spotted owlet at around midnight. I have lived in Chennai since 1982 and that has never happened before.”

OK, Pesky humans, time to change!