Sahyadrica

It started out as a feeling Which then grew into a hope Which then turned into a quiet thought Which then turned into a quiet word And then that word grew louder and louder 'Til it was a battle cry                                                   - The call by Regina Spektor Nature writing is a cycle. You discover, write, rediscover, rewrite. You finish a piece, but you never really finish writing. Ten years into blogging (twelve, today), I hinted at my writing process in a letter to my younger self . Since then this thought has been taking root in my mind: what have I learnt from punching keys and scribbling on notepads? When I say you never really finish writing, I mean it particularly for writing about nature. Nature writers don’t lose track of a story once it unfolds and is published. It is the piece that concludes, not th...

The salt-sprinkled chocolate browns of the estuarine mudflats are criss-crossed by the prints of carbon-black tyres. The wind is crisp, and the recurring whoop-whoop-whoop of the enormous ghostly wind turbines is ubiquitous, occasionally punctuated by sounds of trucks that trod on the pathless mudflats to reach the nearest salt port. On this truck-trodden path, we look for signs of a particular bird that blends well with the grey-brown landscape, the MacQueen’s Bustard, a rare winter migrant. It is nowhere to be found, but along sparse grasses, pale green in colour, are tracks of various birds imprinted on a layer of fine, seemingly frozen crust of sand. One of which belongs to this bird. The smaller tracks belong to, we think, Desert Warblers; those small, hypersensitive brown birds seen probing the grass strands for tiny morsels during early winters. The largest of all, the three-toed prints, belong to the Common Crane, we acknowledge without a doubt. We saw them graze in a small ...