Sahyadrica

Harvester Ants, Trichomyrmex  sp., rush in and out of their underground nest carrying grass seeds and husks. If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now It’s just a spring clean for the May Queen Part I: Ants It is no exaggeration when one says that ants are the ultimate animals shaping the world. But no one says it openly or publicly. The very few who write are read by the fewer few who really read only about ants and all things ants do. And ants do everything a man or an elephant does. So, between making a statement calling ants ultimate and having no one to attest to, I’m left only with my fascination for ants to try to back up the bold claim. Anyone who likes any particular organism calls it the ultimate – of course the redwoods are ultimate, the tiger is ultimate, the elephant – ultimate, the woodpecker, the king cobra, so on. Ants are not merely ultimate in that sense. They’re not big or colourful or, in vertebratalist sense, individualistic and intelligent...

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...

Once young, wild, and free. Rama. After an introduction to the status of elephants in central India, focusing on the state of Chhattisgarh , I started collating available statistics to provide a summary of elephant populations, deaths due to man-made reasons, and human fatalities due to elephants, for the country. Much of this data was not actively provided by the Project Elephant, which it ideally should, but gleamed through from the Rajya Sabha Question and Answer session notes. The fact that questions on human-wildlife conflict resulting in animal and human deaths are frequently asked at India’s meeting of the council of states, shows that it is a pressing, political issue. Such information, collected through taxpayer money no less, should be available to the public without waiting for yearly sessions. The elephant in the room is a poster summarizing publicly-available information on wild elephants of India and human-wildlife interactions resulting in deaths. A high-resolution poste...