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Birds of a Feather

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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...

The Giants of Chhattisgarh: The Elephant in the Alleyway

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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...