Sahyadrica

Birds of a Fig: a pair of Great Hornbills and a friend, Yellow-footed Green Pigeon on chilubor gos. It is a spectacle of nature Come summer monsoon winter Naturalists flocking together: Birds of a feather. A tree and a tree make not a forest A bird without bough nests not A deer without shade has no rest Mere eyes cannot express the lost. And if there are no forests standing The birds songless flying The deer kinless wandering What is man but a soulless being It is the essence of nature To express what we feel see hear A naturalist without pen and paper: A bird without feather. Whenever opportunity arises, I explore nature in ways I did not earlier: by letting go of things I wish to see and seeing what others see. It takes some resolve to let go of the urge to see what one intends to see. To reach here, I am just beginning to see things as they present themselves, abstaining from treasure-hunting, the way of the hunter, to living in the moment, the...

Finding signs of wild animals in sandy stream beds, wide riverbanks, in dense forest understorey, often riddled with those of the domestic kind – the livestock – is like going on a treasure hunt. Every afternoon when we returned we sat under the warm winter sun listening to each other’s finds. I found a pile of scat on a boulder, full of hair, fluffed up because it was old and dry, and while I discussed my contemplation on the field to assign it to its rightful owner, my companions yelled their opinion at once: jackal hai re ! Well, jackals do love relieving themselves on boulders, unlike cats that prefer to do so away from a pugdundee , or antelopes that have specific latrine sites. On this particular survey, I stood on a 700 m escarpment overlooking the backwaters of Bansagar on Son. There was an undeclared competition among us; if I said I found tiger’s pugmarks, one of my colleagues found water trailing another’s by the river, and another found a tigress with adolescent c...

Her aangan is a reverie of astral flowers  Spiral, elliptic, of mystical shapes and hues, cryptic   The haze of winter morning acts as multi-level drapes to nature’s opera, unfurling a new act fronted by trees every short distance I traverse. Wood smoke wraps around villages like blankets around our shoulders. A tiger calls, and a tigress returns his call, their duet resonating in the cold morning air for miles and miles.  A universe at her doorstep, constellations on her sleeve  She tiptoes under star-clothed trees    The rustle of van tulsi reminds me of a Kathak dancer, her ghungroo chiming with every step I take. Tiny, dark, heart-shaped seeds once contained inside the cup of the mature flower are sprinkled on the pugdundee like confetti. Odd, cold December rains swell them up like little puffy snow balls scattered on bare sandstone substrate. The fluttering sky blue beings rabble ‘round her  Whispering the secrets of the universe...