Real Heroes Do Not.....

It’s the morning after World Wildlife Day – a happy coincidence – and Hanumanth and I are on a long walk in a gorgeous forest, accompanying two sprightly, agile and knowledgeable forest guards. 

We stop frequently, for there is so much to see and heaps to learn.  A swishing sound to our left?  “That’s the wreathed hornbill,” Lakkiram and Gumbo say in a matter-of-fact way, even as I can hardly curb the urge to go Whoop! (and do a jig maybe).  Moments later, they identify a call as coming from the white throated bulbul, another endemic bird in these parts of the North-east, and one more from the grey peacock pheasant, which, from its photo, must rank among the most exquisite in the rarified world of  avian beauty.  

...and you think you look good in a mirror? 
(Online image)

Raptors, elephants, leopards, tigers, clouded leopards, gaur, barking deer, sambar, marbled cats, serow…this is an enchanted forest. 

The guards are in their elements and identify mushrooms, orchids, shrubs and trees with ease – the Nahor with its fresh red leaves, giant trees of elephant apple (its seed, they say, makes for a super anti-dandruff shampoo), duabanga grandiflora, with its gorgeous flower and a dozen others. 

Duabanga grandiflora
A name richly deserved

Their knowledge combines learning with intuitive understanding and, in a substantial yet understated way, they belong here.  Three days earlier, we had watched in admiration as four forest guards in Manas National Park undertook a controlled burn of a grassland patch to enable fresh growth; they were thirty feet away from a herd of - hold your breath – fifty-four elephants and one busy no-nonsense rhino.    

And forest guards across India do this every day.  They fight fires that, at this moment of summer, could be raging in dry forests of tinder, patrol beats on foot in particularly hazardous territory – one of them was trampled on by an elephant in Bandipur Tiger Reserve a few weeks ago - keep poachers of wildlife and timber at bay with antiquated weapons and raw courage, dissuade noisy, brain-dead tourists from being, well, noisy and brain-dead and monitor the general health of the forest.  As teams they are under-staffed across India, under-equipped, under-paid and, often, under-nourished and they live in the most basic – we should emphasise that: the most basic – conditions, yet they are there, doing their job.   

Real heroes do not wear capes.  

We cross a dried river bed with just a trickle of water flowing through it, and reach our destination: an anti-poaching camp with four guards.  Tang Rooh is the most seasoned one among them and he grins when I ask him to hold my neck for a photo as though I was a poacher he had caught stealing his glass of tea.  His knowledge is immense and we listen with admiration to this reticent, humble man:  when it rains, he says, that trickle turns into a raging torrent and these men are marooned for weeks.  On one such occasion, he laughs, they had the occasional unsettling company of a wild elephant. 

Three heroes, two fawns

Time to show off.....

Half an hour later, the tea has been sipped, a few photographs taken, the small talk done and it’s time for us to leave.  We tell them that we cannot imagine how they are able to do what you do.  And that, to us, each of them is a hero, no less.

Their smiles make our day. 

World Forestry Day March 21^st

 

 

 

Creme de la creme

 
If you ask me (which I know you never will)
What did humans (that’s us) invent best?
I will pretend to think and make up a drill
And then answer the test.
 
“Not planes, not cones, not humour (though witty)
Not phones, not cars (now, don’t be absurd)
Not shaving brushes nor ChatGPT
The answer – yes, you guessed it – is good old curd.”
(ps: the only worthwhile invention after this boon
Was the teaspoon)
 
 
Then I see your look, where you roll up your eyes
There are two reasons why you do
a)    There is incredulous surprise; or
b)   You are like me too!
 
When you have a World-this-day or that
Why not National Lactobacilli Day
It’s fermentation’s superstar brat
DiCaprio, horn ok please.  Now, make way.
 
Vegans – good humans - avoid this delicious stuff
Their lips will never mention the word
They make almond milk into a cream-ish bluff
And label that as Honorary Curd
 
(And I always ask a vegan,
“When you started off, how did you ever beegan?”)
 
Now, this ode to curd will end here
The reason isn’t that I am short of time
The only issue with curd (unlike beer)
Is that it’s a bloody hard word to rhyme.
 
Ps: note that this ditty had not a single blood-curdling pun.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Breathe the colour

March 10th

4 pm

The early weeks of March are the finest for a walk in the forest; the landscape is dry but not stifling, leaves of trees have been shed and, while some species are re-greening and getting their canopy back, brown is the colour.
Ananda, Vishnu, my son, and I are the only ones walking through the forest now, along thin paths covered with dried leaves that crackle and crunch under our feet. There is little doubt that we were preceded some hours ago by one or more elephants, but, for now, the air is still and silent.
….with a difference.

For, this silent forest speaks through a rich tapestry of colours and fragrance that you will never see or breathe later in the year.  The Flame of the Forest, Butea Monosperma, lights up a striking red patch amidst the brown, the young green and the dense bamboo.  The Taare tree - Terminalia bellerica - a handsome tall arboreal wonder, has a startling, light canopy of young wine-red leaves, matched in lustre by the flowers of the occasional Malabar Silk Cotton in the distant village in the valley.  Pongamias are all around, the forest floor carpeted with chlorophyll-rich, light-mauve fragrant flowers and a million bees working an ecological miracle in buzzing cacophony.  

Then we reach our destination, a rich outcrop of rock surrounded by dense forest of bright green and white, an oasis of noise in that otherwise somnolent silence. It is a sight I have seen every year, yet can never ever tire of, for it is, in a word, breath-taking (and I mean that in every way).

This is a forest of Shorea Roxburghii or Jalaari, and, boy, is that a pathetic, weak introduction! For about fifty weeks in a year, this is a non-descript tall tree, making no official statement whatsoever. After Shivaratri, it begins to bloom and then compensates for its prolonged reticence with a million tiny flowers in dense bunches, each a light cream and exuding the most heavenly, delicate fragrance ever. 

This is spectacular abundance, a cornucopia of sensory delight and the landscape ahead is clothed with it. We sit on a rock, under a mid-sized Jalaari tree – the rich, bright green leaves provide fitting shade – and the flowers drizzle down, falling on our shoulders, lap and all around. It is time to do nothing and Vish has this faraway look in his eyes and we lounge around. 

If you have to be, be a bee.

Eventually, we must leave these old friends behind (a parting is necessary before you can meet again, Richard Bach once said), so we saunter down the kaal-daari or footpath. 

A cactus in bloom greets us with its stunning (yet odd-smelling) flower-of-geometry. 

And nearby, next to a nulla that hosts a seasonal stream, is another treat - Firmiana Colorata or Kombare, a tall, spare tree with a rich, orange cast of flowers. Just flowers. Each is a stunner to see, touch, feel. There are but three of these trees in this forest, so they are hardly profuse, but, if you are a first-timer, it is a jaw-dropping sight of evolutionary adaptation to prevent self-pollination. 

Ananda picks a small branch for us and the bees are hovering around. To remind us that nothing in this orchestrated performance is for the gate-crasher, the traveller. 

Take nothing. Leave nothing behind. 

That is when you know that, in a forest, you are never alone.

The Last Stand

On the fringes of Manas Tiger Reserve
Feb 28th

A lovely clear morning underway as we tread on the soft soil of the paddy field, stopping frequently to scan the flat paddies around us through our binocs.  It’s been a couple of months since the harvest, and the stubble, a brittle brown, is interspersed with patches of fresh grass for which the cows will arrive later in the day.
For the moment, there is no one else.  Just us.

And, somewhere in this vast stretch – over a thousand acres of open paddy - is a bird of a species that is teetering on the brink of extinction.  

There is no place to hide as we walk, our banter is muted and we tread with care. Suddenly, Edison, the young naturalist with us, points excitedly and we hunker down and peer.  It’s hard to control my emotion – excitement dominates for the moment, but I know that there’s much more – and I must focus (and not blink).  There in the far corner of this large open country, amidst the stubble, we see a beautiful head on a slender neck of navy blue and a large brown-and-white body.  The Bengal Florican walks with cautious avuncular dignity, a dainty exquisite bird of immense splendour and bearing.  It moves between the stubble, now lost to sight, now back in focus, a single bird of a population that numbers worldwide in the low hundreds.  It is spectacularly beautiful and we watch enthralled.  
And then it vanishes into the stubble as easily as it had appeared.  

Photo: IUCN

We wait patiently for an hour to see if the same bird or others in its precious depleted flock would show up, but we see none.  It’s getting warm now and cattle – dozens of them – fan out across the paddies; the Florican, if it hadn’t earlier, has now moved away.  

It is a silent exit, in more ways than one.  The story of the bird’s decline is familiar and painfully repetitive: hunting and loss of its grassland habitat being principal causes. 

I think of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, once the most abundant bird on earth, darkening skies as millions flocked across North America.  And of what that extraordinary conservationist and philosopher, Aldo Leopold said:
“There will always be passenger pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights…..They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather.  They live forever by not living at all.”

Those emotions return.  Thrill, yes.  A chill too. Anger that our species could do this. 

And, as with all those moments of great alloyed happiness, there is a surge of ineffable sadness within.  It is the sadness that precedes a requiem, one that, I hope, hand on heart, will never have to be written. 

 
Back in the Maozegendri Eco Camp, Rustom chats with us for an hour exploring conservation options, but he is both wary and weary.  Many like him – the younger gen – have done the rounds, going from home to home in the area speaking of the plight of the Florican and requesting a cessation of hunting and the good news is that those conversations have had some effect.  In one such home, a farmer went in and brought out a Florican egg and handed it over to a bemused Rustom who then placed it under a hen that was roosting.  A Florican chick was the delightful result and he brought it up with care, hoping to reintroduce it into the wild, but one day the door of the cage in which it lived was left open and the bird disappeared.  

You could say with justification and a touch of irony that the stars are yet to align in favour of the Bengal Florican.
…and therein lies a tale of woe.

a time lapse image of the mating ritual of the male Bengal Florican,
taken by the inimitable Ramki Sreenivasan, captures its dance in flight