Tag: outdoors

Nature

Birds, the restive kind…

Birds, the fidgety kind, anyone who likes to stalk them in lush, dense forests is well acquainted with the acoustic delights and visual disappointments… the chirps and rustles spark hope… the human crouches and crawls in a misconception of stealth, the avifauna revels in the foliage… both parties trying to avoid a startle, one looking …

Mountains, Nature

Crickets and their comforting chirps…

Crickets, Ranikhet, Uttarakhand, India

Crickets and their brethren are basslines of the songs that abound the outdoors, vocalizing canopies or anything damp with their chirps and twirps… while the birds bebop from one branch to another, they skittle around with the same restiveness, punctuated with those quantum leaps every now and then… The chirps of crickets and cicadas have …

Nature

Grasshoppers and their hopping hues…

Short-horned grasshoppers

Grasshoppers are intriguing, from living catapults that pleasantly pique a child’s curiosity to swarms of locusts that lay waste to agriculture, one of the pillars of human evolution, survivors par excellence that predate dinosaurs… there was this pumpkin vine at home this time around that had grew remarkably well, partly through the monsoons, and partly …

Mountains

Bhyundar Khal, tripping billies

Bhyundar Khal

Reminiscences from Bhyundar Khal, a high altitude Himalayan trek in Uttarakhand connecting the Valley of Flowers to Gamshali village near Tibetan border

Nature

Housekeepers, the avian kind…

Housekeepers of the wild, Whilte-browed Bushchat

Housekeepers is what comes to mind when one looks at the smaller birds prancing about the terra firma or waiting pensively at the waterside… while the raptors and mammals go about their mauling, impaling, tearing and digging like teenagers, leaving a seeming mess in their wake, the little ones tend to go about their business …