soliloquies in the outdoors…
Grey bushchat – like most ‘chats’, ‘tis gregarious and grumpy, not intimidated by human presence, but not too happy about it either… it doesn’t really set the world, or the woods, on fire with its dull grey and white plumage… ‘tis the songs rather, and the nifty movements that set one up into following its trail… …
Blackbird singing in the dead of the night… – every time I sight one of these demure thrushes, more silhouettes than full profiles most of the time, that earthy earworm of a tune by the Beatles automatically starts playing in the head, albeit the bird most definitely doesn’t sing in the dead of the night… …
Most nocturnal birds are reticent during the day, winding themselves like a clock to unleash quiet furies once dusk settles in… pretty obvious in a way, for everyone needs to rest, be it in cocooned in the dark or shrouded in bright light… but there is a silent undertone to their existence, these hunters of …
Plumbeous redstarts endear one with their restiveness, nudging and ingesting hapless insects trying to fathom fast flowing waters… a songbird punctuating rivers and streams, it darts around from boulder to boulder tracing parabolas in the air, adding to the din of the river with short, shrill calls and animating the surroundings with a flurry of …
The dipper tends to send a few shudders down the onlooker’s well-cloaked disposition before one begins to marvel at its foraging, combing the surface of frigid waters emboldened by gravity before diving into their shallow depths for a morsel… seemingly foolhardy but in reality, one of those evolutionary ingenuities… I knew that the brown dipper …
The treecreeper is a rather comforting bird to look at… ensconced in its arboreal domain, enquiring for food among nooks and crannies, subsisting industriously… twixt humility and hubris, it prefers the former, choosing a benign camouflage over loud contrast… skittering up trees with hastiness akin to a rodent, leading some hapless insects to the end …
Elephants are such content beings, relishing every morsel, making a difference to every inch of the jungle they trudge through… flummox the blind they might, get agitated by the unceasing fragmentation of their wide expanses they do, but for a creature sharing human lifespan, the tolerance and wisdom in their sombre gait goes way beyond… …
Larks have had a distinct section in the canvas of my thoughts in recent times, mostly stuck on to the sub-conscious tapestry since I see a couple of species a lot while running and the Josh Ritter song, so Paul Simon-esque, starts playing in the head almost immediately… they’re part grumpy and part pensive, these …
…When it rains, it pours… …Raindrops keep falling on my head… …Rain on your parade… …Why does it always rain on me… There we were, all primed up for Panpatia Col in the third week of September, supposedly having given the monsoons a wide berth… but then came a spell of rain that battered most …
Lark – a bit smug, this one, the Ashy-crowned sparrow lark, especially the male, the missus still (relatively) demure and consenting… flitting around open fields looking for grains or reaping the rich entomological harvest of the monsoons… quintessentially restive, forever grouchy… happy as a lark? na… not this one for sure… For Shakespeare and Chaucer, …